Mar / April '18 Lite Challenge: Castle Caenwyr

[QED42]

Lots of tough choices from such an open challenge this time round! I have been wanting to do a castle map for a while so why not take the opportunity to do one now. Who to name the map after was a bit tougher, a lot of guild members have great names that would fit for castle but just because Caenwyr has that amazing WIP thread for Ostwyc, city of the lion going (you should check it out if you haven't!) I decided to go with Castle Caenwyr.

The reason I decided to go with a castle is that I've recently been thumbing through some of the Osprey series of books on fortifications (mainly just looking at the pretty pictures). The series gives a really good variety of different castles and inspires a lot of different looks. What I'm mainly going to go with is something inspired by, or largely stolen from, the style of the crusader castles of the Teutonic knights. I like the general aesthetic of the castles but also the way they include some of the near by town usually too. The red brick look of the castles is really striking too.

Right now there are two main castles I'm looking at for inspiration, Malbork in Poland and Viljandi in Estonia. Here is a blast of inspiration images to get the thread started and we can see how far short of the goal I fall.

Malbork

242624377_37fe141c95_o.jpg
cw121_p.jpg
526372d911e3bb42a56cbf447889a1f3.jpeg

Viljandi

Viljandi_Castle_and_Town_plan.jpeg
806px-Viljandi_Castle.svg.png

[Tonquani]

Sounds great, and it looks like you've already got loads of material to work from...

[Tenia]

Oh oh, a castle ! You'll have followers for sure ! Go on and good courage !

[Bogie]

Welcome to the challenge QED42, Sounds like a great project.

[qhqhTerra]

Your picture is a very interesting attempt.
Please do your best!

[QED42]

Thanks for the encouragement everyone! I've done a little bit to get started, unfortunately it seems like including a bit of the town as I had in mind has gone from the plans for the moment. It's a bit of a mess but here's what I have to start with.

### Latest WIP ###
castle.png

[QED42]

I have a question for anyone out there that can help. If you are using the bucket fill tool with GIMP and using it to fill with a pattern is there any way to make it fill at different angles or do I have to rotate the image/layer every time?

[Straf]

With GIMP it seems not, unless you make lots of rotated patterns. With GIMP you can apply a pattern to a path but it doesn't rotate the pattern with the path. However I am certain there is a way to make a pattern follow a path in Inkscape. I'm not in the OS to check as I don't have Inkscape installed here but if you search for Hai-Etlik's Inkscape tutorials you might find something. Alternatively you could bother Hai-Etlik on the Discord channel

[Tonquani]

I suppose you could try taking the magic wand tool to select the area you want to fill, then on another layer stroke the selection (you may need to grow it by 1 pixel) then rotate the whole thing into the desired orientation of the pattern. Fill with the pattern, then copy it back onto you original layer and reverse the rotation. If you've got it all right it should fit.

I'm not at the pic at the moment to check but that's how I would approach it.

[QED42]

Thanks for the feedback, I feared there wasn't an easy way to do what I wanted to pattern ideas might be getting knocked on the head for now.

Here's an update on what I have so far. Some of the colours are just place holders for now.

### Latest WIP ###
castle2.png