Procedural mapping style experiments

[gilgamec]

Hmmm.... I was going to post a bunch of experiments I did, trying to find the "correct" colours which combine to give the right green impression ... then I actually tried it with the colours I used in the actual map, and got about the right shade of green! (Apparently, I've been looking at the combinations too close-up.)

This is done purely by setting the "yellow" color to 50% opacity.

Your problem with the green caught my attention as something SVG filter effects could deal with.

This is neat! I'm most interested in how you captured the minor noise-like effects of the paper grain; that's something I hadn't even considered, and yet my brief experiments in that direction do increase verisimilitude. Thanks!

However, this (and the yellow+blue=green thing, too) does bring up a concern I have: how much should I worry about printing artifacts, or printing processes, in these recreations? The next recreation I'm working on has halftoning, and there's no way I'm going there; I'll just stick to smooth shading of solid colours. But in the 1914 map, I included the waviness of the hatching, and it improved the feel of the map quite a bit. Should I do all of this in a more "simulationist" mode, making all of my colours partly transparent and having the final effect equivalent to inks on paper?

How far do you go in emulating a map style?

[Hai-Etlik]

This is neat! I'm most interested in how you captured the minor noise-like effects of the paper grain; that's something I hadn't even considered, and yet my brief experiments in that direction do increase verisimilitude. Thanks!

It's a fractal noise turbulence filter that I then use as both a displacement map and as a mask. I also apply a Gaussian Blur and multiply everything with the background. Each colour has this applied separately.

[alizarine]

Great-looking reproduction - even if it doesn't look as old as the original it does have that same "feeling". A great way to simulate oldness while still allowing the map to be legible! I'll have to keep working in Illustrator before I get to this point, but I think I'll have to give this a try (with some personal modifications) at some point. Thanks for the info on how you did this!

[The Stoat]

I like this experiment. I note that you are think how to reproduce the style more accurately. I think one of the keys to this is to remember the source of the original, a printing press. I think if your map was turned into masks for the printing press of the era it would end up looking much more like the original. Some differences that are clearly part of the printing process is the resolution and the color densities.
To recreate this best each color should be a separate layer with blur and noise should be applied to each separately to give slightly different effects. My reason for suggesting this is that in the printing process you can see they wanted some colors to bleed more like the yellow and blue. Others were meant to be sharper but suffered from flaws in the print proces, i.e. the J in Jamaica. Also all colors should be somewhat transparent, even the red and black to some extent.
To simulate the paper the base layer should be off white and a light bump map over it all to provide some texture.
I think you have definitely captured the style the maps were created in. My comment are directed at recreating some of the effects of how the maps were actually published. Definite cread for this.