Mapping
Life is good at the moment. New house with a not so new girlfriend, old job done, new job a couple of weeks off, free time... Starting tomorrow, I have a week's holiday in Shanghai and Suzhou. Today, however, I decided I would finally start learning how to use GIMP and craft fantasy maps.
After several hours fiddling, mostly following this tutorial from the Cartographer's Guild, I came up with the map under the cut. Some of the shading threw me a bit, and there's definitely imperfections. I made the brushes for the mountains but I'd like to put more care into them, give them better shading and the like. I'm not sure if I like the faded colour of the trees either - I followed the tutorial's advice on that, but I think a darker colour would be more striking. If you look closely, you can see the fading is uneven too: the tutorial cautioned against that, but I couldn't seem to help it. The map is unlabeled since I disliked every method I tried and then ran out of time, so I clearly need more practice.
Still, it was a lot of fun, and there are a ton of other tutorials on the site. Hopefully it won't be too long until I get better!
After several hours fiddling, mostly following this tutorial from the Cartographer's Guild, I came up with the map under the cut. Some of the shading threw me a bit, and there's definitely imperfections. I made the brushes for the mountains but I'd like to put more care into them, give them better shading and the like. I'm not sure if I like the faded colour of the trees either - I followed the tutorial's advice on that, but I think a darker colour would be more striking. If you look closely, you can see the fading is uneven too: the tutorial cautioned against that, but I couldn't seem to help it. The map is unlabeled since I disliked every method I tried and then ran out of time, so I clearly need more practice.
Still, it was a lot of fun, and there are a ton of other tutorials on the site. Hopefully it won't be too long until I get better!