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Showing posts from January, 2013

Carte du Melronné

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I came up with this while testing the new mapmaking method I recently worked with, and also took it as an opportunity to practise some French. I'm thinking about giving it up for adoption, so maybe someone could invent an actual backstory for it.

Map creation V

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My map goes along for a while. Every now and then I add details; I place the capitals (various maps use stars, squares, circles, castles etc to indicate them. I use bordered circles by dotting them with a full-opacity brush and choosing Stroke in the Layer effects menu in Photoshop). I decide I want islands and soon despair because creating them with the lasso is tedious and provides ugly, repetetive results. I resolve the matter as follows (this should have been done much, much earlier, so make sure you do this step as one of the first): In a new file in Photoshop, I choose Render>Clouds, then Render>Difference Clouds several times. Then on a Levels adjustment layer I push the sliders until my "clouds" are only black and white (could also be done with a Posterize layer, set to 2 levels). Ta-dah, these will be my coastline and islands! I cut, paste, transform and rearrange to my heart's content, erasing the water (I still have a file with the water on a separ