Coloring grasslands

[Josiah VE]

Aha! Thank you!
Btw what's colour jitter? Is it just the apply jitter box in the tools box?
And I think I've put a wrong parchment. Does a brownish parchment work as background??
I've no idea what mess I'm doing. Guess I'll have to post the map here? or a piece of it...

I'm not sure what the equivalent of color jitter is in gimp, but it basically makes the color automatically switch back and forth as you draw to give more variation.
Yes, absolutely post your map, it's the best way to get feedback.
Yep, brown parchment works well, such as the ones Mouse kindly offers.

I made this texture by soaking paper in tea, feel free to use it: https://www.cartographersguild.com/a...6&d=1468250375
I'm also a fan of this texture by CoyoteMax: https://www.cartographersguild.com/a...9&d=1256072213
Here's another one I made with photoshop filters: https://www.cartographersguild.com/a...0&d=1517075741

Two of those textures have pretty noticeable creases and wrinkles, depending on the style you might want to blend them together with layer opacity to make a flatter texture.
I hope that helps.

[Mouse]

I think you need to separate this into two questions and deal with each separately.

It would probably be best if you try to get your background sorted out first before we deal with the question of the grass. I suppose its a bit like getting the right piece of watercolour paper ready before starting a watercolour painting

Josiah's maps always have lovely parchment backgrounds, so you have good advice there in the comment above this one

Once that's done and dusted to your satisfaction, we can probably deal with the grass a lot more easily, since the same grass painting will look quite different on different parchment backgrounds.

I think RobA offered some information on the jitter thing a few comments further back up the thread. Although I use GIMP quite a lot I've never done grass that way, so I don't know very much about it.

I echo, Josiah here - please show us your work. Its a lot easier to help if we can see what's gone wrong

[MapMappingMapped]

Here it is.
It's a bit messy, cos my intention was to color the map, and in some places I really lost control of the pen (the title parchment). Hopefully once I get this one right the way will be opened for a future with GIMP!
Oh, and just wanted to say that playing with GIMP will make you much, much, much more eager to do everything by hand (or traditionally)!

[Mouse]

Oh but that's beautiful, MMM!

I would be very pleased if I could draw such a lively and interesting map by hand. Its just jumping with energy, and those mountains are gorgeous. I could easily imagine using it in a mammoth treasure hunt of some kind

Are you adding any colour to the grass, or leaving it as it is? The reason I ask is because it looks fine to me without any colour

On the matter of GIMP driving you crazy - I think we've all been through that stage

If you should ever go entirely digital, and get yourself a tablet to draw things with (if you haven't already), I would recommend Krita more than GIMP. The pen dynamics in Krita are out of this world in comparison with GIMP.

[MapMappingMapped]

Thanks a lot Mouse! I would like to add color to the grass, I'm still pondering over what colors/style to use (looking at maps in the guild will surely prove beneficial). Btw what do you guys use to add labels to your maps?? Gimp doesn't seem very good at that...

[Mouse]

Well show us what you come up with

I wouldn't want to go too heavy on the grass colour, or the whole map will be nothing but green. Maybe make it a lot fainter green than the trees for a start, or even vary it a bit towards a more orangy hue - green, olive-green and orange-green in watercoloury patches - just very pale perhaps?

On the matter of labels just click the 'A' button in the tool box and click somewhere in the map and start to type. Its a bit awkward to start with until you get used to it, but you can change the font, the size and the colour. There is even a way to curve text, but that involves using paths, and its not really all that great since the text spacing and size doesn't adjust to fit the path length that you might have drawn along the ridge of a mountain range, for example. You just have to do it by trial and error - find the right length of path for the size of text, or the right number of spaces to add between each letter to stretch the text out along the line...

Best advice - if you want to do curvy text like that its really important that you first learn how to add and edit paths properly. There are loads of videos on YouTube

I've heard Inkscape recommended a number of times as a label manipulator, and I've heard its very good, but I'm a bit hazy on how its done. Maybe one of the others can help?

[RobA]

I'll second inkscape for doing map labels, as it supports text on a path, and you can adjust the path and the text will change.

My general workflow for labels is:

- Export my map from Gimp as a jpg then

- open up Inkscape,
- load the jpg image
- resize the canvas to the inside
- lock that layer
- create a new active layer
- make all my text labels (and often city icons, borders, etc usually each type of thing on its own layer)
- hide all the layers but the one I want back into Gimp (i.e labels)
- export that as a png file

- back in Gimp, load the PNG file saved from Inkscape as a new layer
- apply any desired effects in Gimp like outlines, glows, drop shadows or the like.



-RobA>

[Eri]

heya Triple M.. if you're still looking for how to colour jitter in gimp



Random colour is alright as it changes the colour between fore and back as well as colours in between but I also wanted one for random colour and rotations of the brush. So I created new and ticked random colour and angle