Hey guys, thanks for the kind words!
JDragon said:
#1 Do you have plans to show how to do mountains for large overland/campaign maps? Maybe in your book? This has always been my stumbling block for maps, but I already have a few ideas I want to try using what I learned today.
Eventually! After I post next week's episode, I'm going to take 2 weeks off (partly to just to take a break, but mostly to spend as much time as I can with my son before he starts his first year of school!). When I come back, I'll be talking about
this map for a few episodes, and we'll get into some painterly mountain-building with it. There are a
lot more in the book, though!
#2 How do you do the groups for layers? (IE the tress, Paper, etc)
#3 When I was trying to do the road, my line from the pen tool kept showing up as a white line in the middle of the brush stroke. Did I miss something or is this a setting somewhere.
Wraith answered both of these.
#4 What other podcasts / sites would you suggest for photoshop beginners or close to it?
If you head over to
Zombie Nirvana I've got a list of about 10 Photoshop links to other sites that I've found to be particularly good.
If I had to pick just one, it'd be Bert Monroy's podcast,
Pixel Perfect. A lot of Photoshop tutorials are basically, "do A, do B, do C, done". Bert really gets into a lot of detail about what he's doing and why he's doing it, and that's something I've been striving to emulate in the
FCAP podcasts.
Now, you
can learn something from those other sites, though, even the photo-manipulation ones. If you can take the time to really dissect the tutorials and figure out how it is they're working, there are a lot of ways you can apply those techniques to mapmaking. Just as an example, that woodcut/engraving look I used on the lake came about by looking both at S. John's method and studying some different methods for turning photographs into line art. I never would've been able to put it together if I hadn't spent time playing around with a lot of cheesy photomanip tutorials and figuring out how they worked!
I've also learned a lot about color by checking out different Photoshop sites dealing with digital photography and color correction.