Haunted Mansion: An After-the-Fact WIP

[Ashenvale]

I began the process by reviewing dozens of floor plans of Victorian and other mansions that I downloaded from the internet. I strongly recommend that, if you create a haunted mansion, you look at real mansion floor plans first. I found it enormously inspirational, even though I eventually rejected most of them and struck out on my own. I'm commencing this thread while on vacation on the beach. I copied my graphic files for this project and brought them with me, but failed to copy the dozens of floor-plan diagrams I downloaded. Blast!! I'll post them (out of order) in this thread once I get home next week.

Despite the power and inspiration these existing floor plans gave me, I decided to create my own from scratch. I scribbled out a slew of rough floor plans with a pencil. Unfortunately, I don't have any of them any more. The best, however, included a broad ballroom, a small courtyard sandwiched between house wings, and a variety of other features that felt right to me. I scanned it.

I then built walls over my scan. Using my Rectangular Marquee Tool, I created a long horizontal block spanning the width of my picture plane (my open window). This became my wall template. I then duplicated this template layer numerous times with the Ctrl J command (which makes a duplicate copy of the layer). I used the Free Transform function, holding down the Shift key, to rotate the duplicate wall layers to 45 degree and 90 degree images where necessary. I blocked out the ground floor's walls, erasing out everything that didn't fit my schematic.

For the arched walls in the hallway at the southeaster corner of the mansion, I used the Eliptical Marquee Tool. I held down the shift key to constrain each elipses I used to a circle, rather than an irregular elipse. I set the edge of each circle at the outside perimeter of each arc, then use the Stroke function to create the arc itself. (If you want your arcs to have clean edges, always set the Elipse Marquee Tool as the outside perimeter, and then use the Stroke/Inside tool to create your block.)