The smoke is fantastic!
The smoke is hand drawn with tablet borrowed from my fried. I had several reference pictures mostly found from the quild pages to see how the clouds and smoke is formed.
I started painting with airbrush using a light and dark tone of grey to create roughly spherical shapes. Then I added shades of orange and browns and some white higlights.
I also created few new layers to add 3D feeling the same way as I do with my mountains. This way I got more higlights and shadows in the right places. More details of that technique is found from my tutorial. http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=4405
I now also played a bit with water and added waves and ripples. Let me know if you don't like it and if I should stick with the previous water version.
That volumetric smoke is great, has a real depth to it. Rep for that as I now have something new to learn. I like the previous water tho.
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 agree that the smoke is much better now.
I kinda like the water too.
My Finished Maps | My Challenge Maps | Still poking around occasionally...
Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
I think I'm now finished with my smoke. I'm happy with it and I cannot make it any better. I tweaked the water a bit more to give it better sun reflection and wave form. I added few rivers and small lakes, but no habitaion yet, it will be next.
And just before posting I added legend too. I usually do that last, but I felt I had to do something else than drawing more rivers or something. I wanted the legend to represent the Island so I made it to look like rusting metal with fire in it.
I cant get over how nice that smoke just is
The smoke is VERY impressive, I wish i had a tenth of your artistic talent!
I had this photo of a village symbol from Tellaro Italy in the left. The octopus itself was great, but the picture or more precise the lighting was not perfect. So I retouched it, cleaned up the shadows, enhanced the colors and added missing details. Then I added some more rust to it to blend better with the colors of the legends I had created yesterday. I started playing with image distortion and reflections and finally came up with nice glass effect. So now the octopus is inside a solid glass mass and looks great.
Very cool...
My Finished Maps | My Challenge Maps | Still poking around occasionally...
Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.