The Road to Tiamis

[J.Edward]

This piece is so gorgeous Mouse
I love it. This will be another splendid map. No doubt.
Are there other wonderful sketches and drawings that you are hiding from us?

[Mouse]

Aw thanks J.Edward

There are other drawings in this pad, but they are all about 24 years old and really bad compared with this one, and none of them are anything to do with maps. Its very strange, but I think I have improved a lot with age even though I haven't sat down to do a pencil drawing in all that time. I've always been a landscape painter - oil on canvas which is more about composition and colour than drawing.

But... I haven't ruled out doing another hand drawn map one day, maybe for a challenge. I don't know. It depends if I feel able to draw something appropriate for the challenge

[Mouse]

This is the bit that I'm still learning - using GIMP to colour things.

My goodness. Its really difficult to tame the colours down from blindingly luminous! I take back all those times I've wittered on about other people's maps being a tad on the bright side here and there. I'm having a hard time with it myself! LOL!

Well... we have a sky - its a very bright sky, but its a sky



I like "Overlay", and "Colour", but "Saturation" (which I used to dim down the excessively bright blue of the clear sky just a bit) washes out the paper texture. I might find another way to do that bit.

EDIT: Incidentally - I've had Debussy's Clair de Lune going on and on in my head all day long, which might explain the rather gushy cloud forms

[J.Edward]

It looks good, though bright.
I don't use GIMP but I assume layer properties may be similar or same...
Thus you might try multiply, using a very light and slightly less saturated blue. There are a lot of thing you can do with that.
Sometimes i do several faint multiply layers to achieve some effects.

Evenso, the clouds look very full and atmospheric. Very nice.

[Straf]

One of the trees in the forest on the right hand side in the middle has a leaf drawn the wrong way round . Apart from that it's breathtaking, although I do agree with the colours being very bright. I don't know enough about layer blend modes - would adjusting the opacity work? Or overlaying a grey layer or something?

[Mouse]

Thanks again for the extra praise and the tips and tricks, John.

I'm so new to GIMP that it was only this morning I discovered how to change the view to "single window" so that I didn't have all the dockers and toolbars floating all over the place and getting in the way. LOL!

I wish that I had tried this a few weeks ago. There aren't many maps that require a storm front formation, but now I think about it I could have had a fair try at a floating island.

Next time....

EDIT: Haha - ninjad by Straf! LOL!

[Mouse]

One of the trees in the forest on the right hand side in the middle has a leaf drawn the wrong way round . Apart from that it's breathtaking, although I do agree with the colours being very bright. I don't know enough about layer blend modes - would adjusting the opacity work? Or overlaying a grey layer or something?

Thanks Straf! LOL!

I don't know how I'm going to play this from here. I guess I'll try a bit of everything until I find something that works, but I really am going to stop telling people they've got their greens too green from here on in

[Straf]

I have used colourise to desaturate and things like that but you need to record your settings in case you add something to that layer. It would be nice if GIMP came with a version changelog for drawings, a workflow journal of sorts that logs your every step.

[Mouse]

I'm having a really hard time trying to work without CC3s Sheet effects. I could have taken the saturation down in a matter of seconds with that, and reversed it later without any harm.

Never mind, eh. I'm cracking open the cider at this end now, so anything serious or complicated will have to wait until tomorrow

Happy New Year - one and all

[damonjynx]

This is looking sensational Mouse. I really like the colouring as is…