It's been a busy couple of weeks, but I've managed to get a lot of work done. I've redone the mountains (twice in fact!). I've worked on the forest textures, using textures from this thread. I've added a couple places and tweaked labels and a bunch of stuff like that, too.
I'm pretty happy with how it looks, and I'm thinking I'm very nearly done with it. Sorry I keep uploading a small sized version, but I've been having trouble with the site uploader, even after shrinking the full-sized version.
And without further ado, here it is!
So I got distracted for awhile, but I finally got around to finishing the thing. I didn't bother with a map key, as I didn't really think it was too necessary. I mean, I thought it was pretty obvious what was going on. The actual final product is huge, so I scaled it down to add here. And here it is, my first completed map!!
Instead of the white rectangles under the text what if you did the text like you did for the ocean but use yellow instead of white? I can barely make out the road names, maybe try a gray on them instead of the black (the small scale makes them hard to read so maybe the lighter shade of gray will help). All in all, though, pretty nice.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
I appreciate the feedback!
The original is roughly 7000 x 5500, 300 dpi, so it's taken quite a hit to make it here. I'm tinkering with the feature names now, and yeah, a lighter gray is working really well . I think I'll leave the white boxes, though. I rather like the look, and I'm not a huge fan of yellow in general, especially for fonts.
EDIT: map with font color tweaks.
Last edited by xequar; 12-09-2009 at 12:24 AM.
Dropping the opacity of the white glow would help immensely with the town fonts in my opinion. Another thing to try might be to make the boxes a bit more irregular in shape(ie following the letters general size/shape) and then blur so you don't have as much hard space between the small letters and the top of the box.
Generally, I would convert the text to a path, path to selection, increase the size of the selection a few px, fill with color(white in this case). remove the selection and blur. Of course, this effect depends quite a bit on the letter spacing also, but usually does quite a good job of not having a ton of extra glow area...
My Finished Maps
Works in Progress(or abandoned tests)
My Tutorials:
Explanation of Layer Masks in GIMP
How to create ISO Mountains in GIMP/PS using the Smudge tool
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Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.