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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JVisgaitis" data-source="post: 3326477" data-attributes="member: 4177">When I first saw the maps I had my money on tovokas. Hopefully I can eek out a third place...Anyway, as to how I did the map, pretty much I do all of the initial sketching digitally directly in Corel Painter IX using the scratchboard tool. I like to work directly over the original map on a different layer. In this case, I drew everything over the black and white map.Everything on the map is drawn by hand. Every mountain, every tree, every town, etc. I'm really not a big fan of using layer styles in Photoshop for Campaign Maps. Don't get me wrong I do it myself with dungeon maps and such, but for a world map I like to have something that looks like it was created in that time period instead of something that's overly stylized and Photoshop looking.Once I have all of the lineart in place, I take the file into Photoshop (I'm using CS3) and there I make the land all black and the water all white (I find Photoshop is much more accurate for this). With my two new layers of land and sea I'm back into Painter and tweaking all of the actual colors of the map using Preseve Transparency so I'm only painting on either the land or sea areas.For this its a lot of experimentation to get a look I like and this is the longest part of the process. The brushes I use are the Digital Water Color Broad Water Brush, the Just Add Water Blender Brush, a bunch of custom brushes used by Don Seegmiller, and a custom brush our lead artist created aptly called The Avadnu Brush.Once I have all of the colors to my liking, I go back into Photoshop and type in the location names, tweak the color levels of the painting using the Levels Command, and put a stroke around the landmass in black using Layer Styles. At this point, I'm really close to done.I go back into Painter and clean up the map gradiations of color and such so it looks smooth, add in the rivers and the boundary lines between the countries, and clean up the names of the locations by erasing out the land features beneath them. With this map, the last thing I did was the War of the Burning Sky logo. Again, I wanted a look that could have been developed in the time period.If anyone has any questions on how I do this, I'll be happy to answer. Good luck to everyone.All in all a fun process except for the middle exploration part which sometimes gets kinda frustrating when you can't find the proper look.</blockquote>

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