Map Dump.

[abhorsen950]

Good Evening guys,

Long time member/lurker/fan of the site. I posted some really embarrassing hand drawn attempts years ago and held off. Map drawing has always eaten away at my mind and is one of my favourite parts of history books, videogames and tableptop roleplaying games. So the magic has never really gone away.

I want to collect all of my work as a kind of digital sketchbook in one place, for all you map lovers to comment and critique and help me in this journey of putting maps together and actually improving.


First finished landmass for now. As I get my head around adding my own brushes in GIMP etc.

Thanks for looking guys,
Steven

[abhorsen950]

Few more land masses. Really want to take my time with this and get each section of it cemented in with lots of repetition.







If anybody has got any tips on how to a)create your own brushes, but then also b) to resize them correctly so I can actually use them on my maps in GIMP. That would be a huge help,

Thanks for looking guys,
Steven

[XCali]

Hey! A fellow GIMP user.

Rule number one NEVER give up. I often fail at things I experiment with, but a lot of times I succeed and then I can use that skill learned somewhere going forward. But if I kept just seeing how bad my failures were, I would have never gotten as far as I did in my map making journey.


Now, with that out of the way I would ask you to be more specific in what KIND of brushes you wish to create. For instance, I often create my own brushes, but it is normally fully colored trees or the sort. Then you can have your brushes based on textures(the normal fair).

For the actual mapping elements brushes I would suggest you get your full map canvas up then select a block that is just a bigger than what you need for your trees, or whatever you want to brush, to be. Then you draw the outline of said trees, and then in a layer below you add solid colors before you take a round soft brush(the round brush with the faded egde)

With it, you pick LIGHTER colours or DARKER COLORS, though I find it easier to start from the SOLID darker colour and use a Lighter colour on LOW opacity to start paint in your highlights and every now and the switch to darker to pronounce a certain shadow.
It's kind of hard to explain sometimes. I've been doing it by second nature for so long so sorry if it is confusing.

I'll point you to my Ocean Depths Tutorial which tackles the concept of highlighting and shading. Also, here is an idea of how my trees of my last project looked from lineart to completion.


Okay, so last thing. I would like to know what kind of things you wish to accomplish currently, that maybe feels out of reach, maybe I can help.

Like for example, your efforts above, is a bit strange as I keep wondering which color represents land and which not. Since both are brown colors.

[abhorsen950]

Thanks for the kind words man! Slow and steady wins the race for me with this, most definitely!

So, by brushes, I mean, mountain and tree brushes. So it's easier for me to infill my maps with details. I can input them into GIMP as a brush, I've figured out that part, but when it comes to using it they are vastly over sized and look really stupid on the map. When I try to resize them, they very heavily pixelate and become unusable.

I understand your confusion with the colouring and I couldn't agree more with the critique. I was following a weathered fantasy map type tutorial however I'm not a massive fan of it on reflection. These efforts were merely to practice creating realistic looking land masses using techniques I've read up on and I am pleased with the outcome. Upon further reading I'm not so much of a fan of the heavy outlines to the land spaces. I would also like to add biomes to the maps therefore the one colour doesn't really work.

I hope to do some more work over the next couple of days and work on more realistic colours (blue for water etc) and move forward from there.

Thanks,
Steven

[abhorsen950]

Bit of frustratingly slow progress today, but happy with this land mass generation.



It's been a long day at work so I'm going to give myself a break so I don't get frustrated and or annoyed and give up.

Thanks guys,
Steven

[XCali]

So, I get you with the oversized thing. Happened to me a lot. But, I learned to pick a spot on the map where I want my trees and how big they should be, THEN I selected a block bigger than that and go to create the trees. Then you stay close to the size necessary so when you have to downscale just a bit you don't lose a lot of detail. Hope that makes sense. Also, a 1920x1080 is woefully too small to get much details on a map. I'm struggling sometimes at 4900x3500. So be aware of that with Gimp. On a vecor base program(Like Inkscape) it might not prove as much of a problem.

[XCali]

Bit of frustratingly slow progress today, but happy with this land mass generation.



It's been a long day at work so I'm going to give myself a break so I don't get frustrated and or annoyed and give up.

Thanks guys,
Steven

For this effort, I admire that you want to create more random coastlines. But it is too jagged. I'd scale it down just a tad.

If I may, here is a set of landmasses I just created. It may give some insight.
Just used a SOLID ROUND brush to paint these. Nothing fancy.

Right Click on the land layer. Select Alpha to Selection and drop in your color.

Again Alpha to Select on the land layer, then used that paint blotch basic gimp brush on LOWER opacity to ROUGHLY click away with the basic Green and the basic brown.
(Normally, I would try and find a nice texture without any clear repeatable areas (desaturate it to greyscale) and then put it on overlay above the land layer to give extra detail. BUT for this I didn't do it.)

ON THE LAND, Alpha to select, invert the selection, grow selection by 1, Filter>Blur>Gausian Blur. 0.5 (This is to take away the blockiness of the coastline -Also optional.)

For the Sea, I created a layer below the land layer and threw in a solid blue color. Then I used that paint blotch brush again with a lower opacity lighter blue OR darker blue. Then roughly painted in the sea.

3- For the land edge. Alpha to select the land again. Then take soft edge blur brush, with it you take a darker brown and on LOW opacity you add some brown to the edge of the land.
If you have any questions, just ask


For this I took two of my custom tree brushes. At 80x80 pixels per tree they are perfectly fine for this area. Then I made sure the spacing of the brush is set higher in right bottom corner. Then starting at the back I paint forward, making sure I don't leave one's trunk on top of the other in the open.
Then I made a shadow layer below the trees, above the land layer and added Core(Darker and smaller) shadows and Cast (Lighter but a bit bigger) shadows under the trees.

(If you are wondering what I did with the ground under the trees, I just added highlights and shadow with the ink blotch brush. )


I tried as best I could to use simple-ish techniques to pull off this tutorial. If you read it through you might learn something, who knows. Anyway, I hope this helps.

[abhorsen950]

Awesome. Really appreciate the examples! Will attempt to put that more into practice over the coming days.

Please see attached my latest effort. Drawn with a simple paint tool and then using a cloud layer behind to merge the two and allow for a hopefully more natural looking landmass.



Appreciate your contributions and will try to produce some more work soon.
Kind regards,
Steven

[Greason Wolfe]

Another option would be to look at RobA's tutorial for regional RPG maps. It approaches coastal shape generation a little differently, but I've found it useful even though I don't use Gimp.

https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ead.php?t=1142

Other than that, you're making progress and developing techniques, both very important to the map making process as a whole.

[abhorsen950]

Another option would be to look at RobA's tutorial for regional RPG maps. It approaches coastal shape generation a little differently, but I've found it useful even though I don't use Gimp.

https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ead.php?t=1142

Other than that, you're making progress and developing techniques, both very important to the map making process as a whole.

This tutorial blends two different tutorials I have been following to give that coastline some definition and I really, really appreciate the input as it makes it a lot clearer than anything I have been reading thus far.

Hope to put it to good use soon!
Kind regards,
Steven