Sketch 1: My Dear Arramatapo
Loopysue
ProFantasy 🖼️ 39 images Cartographer
I've been messing around with making my own textures, and decided to do something with one of them...
This is a letter received by carrier pigeon by Arramatapo - our erstwhile hero-to-be. Here he has unravelled the tightly folded map and smoothed it out on the kitchen table...
I have only done the background and the letter part of it just yet. The rest of the space will be a map of the journey Arramatapo must undertake to rescue his father.
What do you think? Worth carrying on with, or just a whim?
This is a letter received by carrier pigeon by Arramatapo - our erstwhile hero-to-be. Here he has unravelled the tightly folded map and smoothed it out on the kitchen table...
I have only done the background and the letter part of it just yet. The rest of the space will be a map of the journey Arramatapo must undertake to rescue his father.
What do you think? Worth carrying on with, or just a whim?
Comments
Those freehand lines doesn't quite have the same fluid flow that a pencil line unfortunately, they look a bit artificial at some points. Are you drawing those with a mouse or a pen?
Good start.
Cheers,
~Dogtag
Oh yes, most definitely CC3. I know how to steer this thing a lot better than anything else I've got
You're right - they are mouse lines, but I'll work on them. They were quite literally a 5 second dash to put a couple of ideas down before the image vanished from mind. Thanks Dogtag
I'd already realised it was the wrong font, but I've got to go and see mum this afternoon, so I won't be able to do anything for a few hours.
Dirtying it all up is going to be part of the fun, and I'm hoping to make a new set of symbols to use with this texture.
Not sure if I'm going to use colour. I don't know if you'd really find a lot of paint sets in a dragon's lair. Depends how educated they are I suppose
Bill
treasure map symbols from old maps ?
It won't take that long to re-create them because they are all quite simple line drawings. However I have the facility to make them into proper transparent individual symbols for you to use, if you want/need them, that is. Would you like that?
As for the texture itself...I like the base color of it. However, if I may make a suggestion or two?
This is a bit convoluted, so bare with me a moment. My family has an old diary/journal that was written by an ancestor prior to the American Revolution. It currently sits under glass in my aunt and uncle's house. It was written somewhefe in the mid to late 1600's. It's hard to read, not only because the ink is somewhat faxed with time, but because of the paper it was written on.
The paper has a.... a pulpy texture to it. That's how I know best to describe it. You can see the bits of wood pulp in the paper....where, in spots, whomever created the paper didn't grind the pulp down far enough before they rolled it out and dried it.
What I'm trying to say...is the base texture seems a little too clean... now you mentioned you needed to 'dirty' this up a bit...are you planning to give it texture to help it look like pulpy parchment?
Parchment itself - real parchment - is actually animal skin (usually goat or calf) which isn't tanned but soaked in lime to remove the fur, and then stretched on a primitive wooden frame and scraped by hand with an equally primitive circular-bladed scraper. Its finally dried for about a day in normal temperature air. The parchment is cut from the stretching frame and remains in its stretched form with paper-like rigidity. Real parchment isn't waterproof, and is very vulnerable to moisture, which is why its usually in quite a state unless its newly manufactured (and yes - they do still make it).
Vegetable parchment is a modern invention that involves dissolving the cellulose in the plant cell walls and using that a bit like glue to hold the sheet together on drying. That's really translucent, and is sort of how they make grease-proof paper.
What you describe is hand made paper - made with wood pulp. There is also paper made from cotton rags, which is highly sought after by artists, and hand manufactured not far from me. That also has a pulpy texture like wood pulp paper, but its texture is extremely fine - hence the interest from artists, who will pay £50 for an A0 sized sheet of the stuff. I have a very small £1 swatch of it as a souvenir from a visit to the factory.
I know the folds in my parchment texture are a bit too perfect and all very similar, but I'm hoping the dirtying process will disguise that fact. I'm working on a few dirt symbols that can be used to 'stamp' areas of dirt on the parchment, and I may cut a few holes in the parchment where the folds are greatest in intensity to let the wood texture of the table show through (also a home-made texture).
I'm also working on the text and its presentation. I need to make it somehow... blotchy, but not evenly blotchy. Not sure how....
Ah! Just had an idea
Remember the way I discovered how to blur symbols some time back? Well, I can use a sheet with Solid White 10 patches on it to slightly blur the underlying sheets. I'll have to be careful I don't blur the parchment too much, but I think it might work.
Thanks Storm - you see, even when you aren't having one of your ideas you always seem to spark a whole load of spin-off ideas in me
Just a thought,
Bill
I was going to apply stains to the paper by transparency, or try various blend modes. There is actually quite a texture to the texture, if you see what I mean. I've just had to reduce it all so much to upload it that you really can't see it on the image.
Let me give you a much smaller sample at a much larger scale.
You can also see that the folds are way too sharp. I think I need to introduce a bit more Fractalization and Gaussian blur to the pattern before combining it with the paper.
Its a bit difficult to see the details on this map. If you want to see the larger version its here:
https://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=35653&p=315936&viewfull=1#post315936
The coffee stain is just a tad on the dark side, so you might have to apply a bit of transparency to it if you want to make good use of it.
If the process of uploading it has stripped it of this quality please accept my apologies (and don't forget to let me know so I can do something about it)
Thanks
My margins are always straight when handwriting... mind you, I'm old enough that I used to get into serious trouble if they weren't. If I were 10 years older than I am, I would probably have had my knuckles quite literally rapped with teacher's wooden ruler for not getting it right. We weren't allowed to write with anything other than a pencil until our double handwriting (joined up letters) was already "Copperplate", like a Calligrapher's. Pupils who were still handwriting in pencil by the age of 8 were openly ridiculed for being "babies" in class - by the teacher.
My! How things have changed!
Mind you. I doubt that Arramatapo's dad would have been all that worried about handwriting (other than it just being legible), so I concede the point.
Well considered
Bill
Its called Benegraphic. I got it from Dafont.com, but it did take several hours to choose. There are literally thousands to look at, and after the first 45 minutes or so they all start to look a bit the same! LOL
I'm going to leave the setting alone now, and move on with the actual map part of the document
I noticed that you said that you don't understand the Spacial Matrix Process. Try doing a google search on User Defined Filters for PaintShop Pro. That's what this effect is.
Here is one tutorial that explains it in some detail. There was another better tutorial that was around a few years ago, but is seems that it no longer exists. Hope that helps!
I'm so sorry, but I'm not as clever as you think. I read it several times, but I still can't understand. Not to worry, though. I will experiment with it over time and try to work it out that way.
I don't suppose there is a library of example files that I and others could have a look at is there?
You probably have several default settings there. (I say probably because there were a few custom settings that I dragged over from my CC3 and I can't remember if spatial matrix were some of them.)
If not, I'll take screen shots of the matrix settings for you.
I shall go away and have a play.
Thanks Shessar
Not sure I'm going to use any symbols in this particular map. Just wanted to know if you wanted me to make them again for you, but if they are ok, then that's all right
EDIT: don't worry - saw your answer on the other thread
We have to bear in mind that Arramatapo's dad is stuck in the back of a badly lit dragon's cave, and that his only tools are the ones he had in his carry sac when the dragon ate his mule and most of his equipment... while he escaped (Poor Minty).
To draw this map he has at his disposal one journal, from which the page has been torn/cut a couple of quills, a set of 12 coloured inks for illustrations and a single relatively large ink wash brush.
I'm hoping that the work I've done creating a set of ink textures (which are transparent like the Solid White and Solid Black series) is going to pay off.
Please let me know what you think. The dragon by the way, is just a sketch - not the finished article. Just shows what the undiluted inks look like when used in the quill.
As a side note. I had to write an entire page of the journal to create the text showing through the paper from the other side, so I'll upload that one as well so you can see what it says
Just wondering!
LLAP
Nacon4