EUREKA MOMENT: CA15 Heraldic Symbols as CA180 Marine Dungeons 2 Brass Inlays
Royal Scribe
🖼️ 187 images Surveyor
I just had an epiphany -- one that may be obvious to most of you but has tickled me to pieces.
Ever since I saw Ralf's two video demos of Marine Dungeons of using the brass inlays (which prompted me to immediately purchase the 2021 Annual), I have been obsessed with putting in brass inlays wherever I can get away with it. I even did one in my recent Sun God temple which was in a Mike Schley style, only I used a goldleaf background from Sue's Parchments with a crude, hand drawn depiction of the sun.
I have wanted to do more inlays in everything, but I am not an artist. But it suddenly occurred to me: Sue's inlays are vector images, and CA15 Heraldic Symbols (from Annual Volume 2, 2008) are vector images, and some of those vector symbols are varicolor....
So I experimented, and it worked! Upper left is one of the vector images from Marine Dungeons, just as an example of how it's supposed to work. Upper right is a dolphin symbol from Heraldic Symbols that intentionally keeps the black outline, as does the fleur-de-lys crest in the lower left. The lion intentionally omits the black border.
There aren't a ton of symbols in Heraldic Symbols, and fewer still that are varicolor, but the cool thing is: if you use CA15 Heraldic Symbols to design a coat of arms, and use the varicolor symbols set to the magenta #6, you can then have the coat of arms engraved in brass at the base of the dais in your throne room. Just copy the crest into your map and move it to the floor sheet after placing the brass inlay fill on a sheet directly behind the floor (adding the color key effect to the floor if your map doesn't already have that).
and 2 others.
Comments
Another revelation that will be obvious to more experienced cartographers here: the TEXTURIZE effect!
I have been wanting to use heraldic symbols stitched onto fabric to make carpets, table runners, banners...and I kept looking in vain for fabric fills. The Modern set includes different colors of carpeting, but it was a little too photorealistic to work with things like Dungeons of Schley.
Through trial and lots of error, I stumbled across the Texture effect and was able to apply it to both a color polygon and the heraldic symbol on top of it to create the effect of fabric with the symbol stitched on. I experimented with a lot of textures, but the one that seemed most "fabric-like" to me was the DD3 Hay_Dry fill. (If anyone knows of a fill that looks more like linen or other woven fabric, please let me know. Maybe there's a good one in an Annual that I have not yet purchased.) And of course, different fills can create the effect of looking like your sigil was painted on wood, or the cobblestone floor (though with more trial and error, I learned that some fills don't really translate well when used with the Texturize effect).
Anyway, here are some heraldic banners or carpets or table runners or whatever:
Possibly one of the more important, yet least discussed, skills with CC3+ drawing creation is understanding what things can be repurposed beyond what their titles alone may indicate. Textures like this are just one element, as symbols can be reworked/rescaled to look like something completely different too. And then tweaking items using the effects as well. Remembering, or finding, the key thing when you need it is, of course, quite another matter!
Agreed! And that type of "outside the box" understanding really takes experience. Lots of map-making, lots of experimentation, and I continue to learn new things with every Live tutorial video, even when I think that everything will be stuff I know. The tools are incredibly powerful, and there's so many techniques with sheet effects that I have yet to learn.