Motley Mapping Fragments by Abu Lafia

[Abu Lafia]

Hello everybody!
I thought i will use this thread to post from time to time some stuff i'm currently working on, learning and struggling with. Hope you'll enjoy it!

I came to this idea by a small pencil sketch, i scribbled down during and after our last rpg session this weekend. I wanted to scan it and maybe "post-processing" this piece digitally in gimp. It was the first time i scanned something drawn, and i was actually somewhat surprised by the relatively good quality (my friend's scanner is just a common "all-in-one" device, but with 600 dpi). So after cleaning the sketch up a bit, i just (multi-) layered it over a parchment background with different settings (multiply 40%, burn 80%, overlay 80%) and voilà!


I like the look of it and thought tracing the lines in gimp might not even be necessary here.
It's a rather easy way to produce some nice small handouts for pen&paper sessions.
Maybe i'll also have a look, how to add some color to it soon.

Here is the original scan with some more sketches (a manor and a small cellar) :

(scaled down to 50%)

As always, critique, comments, suggestions, in fact any kind of feedback is greatly welcome!
Cheers,
AL

[Chick]

That certainly turned a plain sketch into a beauty of a parchment picture

[soggymuse]

Ooh, no, don't do anything else to that, it looks great. People spend so much time and money to get maps in that style!

[snodsy]

Nice Job Abu Lafia,
Think the hand-drawn quality is always a nice touch. Question: The sketch was duplicated and had the layer effects applied, not the parchment, correct.

[ChickPea]

That parchment map looks fantastic!!

[Abu Lafia]

That certainly turned a plain sketch into a beauty of a parchment picture

Thanks a lot Chick, i'm glad you like it!

Ooh, no, don't do anything else to that, it looks great. People spend so much time and money to get maps in that style!

Thanks soggymuse, much appreciated! I was thinking the same, and after accidentally getting this result, i thought i need to share it. It's really no magic after all, so i hope i'm not revealing any secrets here

Nice Job Abu Lafia,
Think the hand-drawn quality is always a nice touch. Question: The sketch was duplicated and had the layer effects applied, not the parchment, correct.

Thank you snodsy, yes, the layer effects are applied to the (copies of the) sketch, although i forgot to mention, that in the end, i duplicated the parchment background too and put a copy of it on top of the layer stack with an overlay effect (layermode in gimp) on it.

That parchment map looks fantastic!!

Thanks ChickPea! Also, many thanks for the feature!

[Chick]

This is great, but may I humbly suggest you go put it in the Tutorials section?

[Abu Lafia]

Here are two pieces, i started working on while procrastinating my challenge map Not sure when i'll come back to them and maybe make a proper wip, but i wanted to share it with you guys nonetheless and thought this might be a good place for this.

One day i was playing around with the wonderful planet generator by Torben Morgensen and saved some coastlines i liked the most. Here i worked with a mixture of "automated" processes in gimp (mostly stroking a path of the coastline with different sorts of brushes and layermodes) and handdrawn elements on the basis of these generated coastlines.
The mountains in the first pic are rather simple , though i like them actually. The ones in the second are done in the style of the mountains i made on my Tarkir map.
For the title-parchment i used nearly the same technique as for the coastline on both maps.



I hope you enjoy it. Any kind of feedback is, as always, very welcome!
Cheers,
AL

[Bogie]

Nice mountains!

[Azélor]

Nice mountains!

I agree.

What's the name of the font?