Post 16: Roads (continued)
Once the paths for the roads are defined (either using the path tool in GIMP or imported from Inkscape) it is time to actual render them onto the map. There are two main styles for roads – single stroke, and over-stroked. Single stroked roads look like a line (dashed or solid). Over-stroked consist of multiple strokes layered over one another. For example, a wide dark stroke with a light narrow stroke on top will look like a light road outlined in dark. The type of stokes used will be depend on the style you develop, and you might want to use several, along with a legend, to indicate what they represent.
Here we will make a road similar to that of the ones I used in my Niagara map.
Create a new, transparent layer below the town layers, called “Road1”. Select white as a colour, and click Edit->Stroke Path (since there is only one path, it is selected as the current path). Choose a width that goes with your map scale (I used 3 px) and pick a solid line with curved end caps. Click Stroke. (I brought the dialog up again after stroking to show the options used).
Change the drawing colour to black and bring up the stroke dialog again. This time, use 1.5 px, and a custom pattern. Draw the dash pattern you want to use. I made it short dashes.
Change the layer blend mode to Overlay to get a nice road that blends in well. Alternately, different colours could have been chosen up front for the roads if you wanted specific colours. I want them a bit darker, so duplicate the Road1 layer.
This looks nice now, but the roads are hard to see in the forest, so lets fix that. (And here is where the power of paths really comes into play.)
Select the “Forest Bumps” layer, ensuring the mask is selected for editing. Pick the paintbrush tool, with black paint, and a fuzzy brush slightly wider than the road.
Now again, stoke the path (Edit->Stroke Path) but this time select “Stroke with a paint Tool” and make sure paintbrush is selected.
This will paint a black line on the bump layer mask to make the road more visible. You could do the same thing to the colour layers as well to define it more.
Alternately you could stroke with the erase tool to erase areas along a path, or the smudge tool, or anything!
Finally, as an optional step, to make the roads more jittery, I went back and applied a small (3px) displacement map to them (Filters->Map->Displace) selecting one of the noise layers in the drawing. This just makes the roads less smooth, and a bit more hand-drawn. (though it does look better to do this on a single stroke map)
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