I should confess a hidden agenda! Feedback helps to guide progress. It's like audience participation. If everyone screams 'NO!' at me I find another way
For instance, following some very polite suggestions both here and over at the FB Group page I have modified these fills. The heath now has its own linework texture instead of sharing the Meadow linework, and the trees and forests have been updated to look more like the ones on the better parts of the map - lighter backgrounds and fractionally more detailed trees.
And though part of me regrets it, I had to re-draw the Pasture texture because it was shouting more loudly from the map than any of the other fills. I've also done a first draft of the Vineyard fill, and generated a blank green background to paste orchard trees on for the orchard fill. The orchard fill is the odd one out here since it is a combination of fill and symbols. Since orchards only make up a relatively small part of the landscape in most maps I though it would be easier to orientate the rows and decide how many there should be by hand, rather than having any alignment issues with decapitated trees down one side of the field, etc.
I rather suspect the vineyard fill (while an absolute match for the specimen I took from the original Ferraris map) may be a little on the dark side compared to the rest of the set.
Have you tried using Symbols in Area instead of fills for some of these btw? That is also doable using a macro tool, and it allows you to randomize the symbol placement and still use a fill for the background.
Posted By: MonsenThis is beautiful. The old cartographers would have been proud of you.
*Blush*
Thank you very much, Remy!
It is a lot easier for me than it was for them. I don't have to work with the natural inconsistencies and absorbency of rag paper (even the best quality was nowhere near as good as modern art paper), and they never had copy, paste, and CTRL+Z
Posted By: MonsenHave you tried using Symbols in Area instead of fills for some of these btw? That is also doable using a macro tool, and it allows you to randomize the symbol placement and still use a fill for the background.
No I hadn't! What a brilliant idea
I will try that later, when I've finished the Parkland fill.
I always wanted to be a traditional cartographer, but I would have needed to have been born male and about 250 years earlier than I was to have taken part in project like this.
Just so I know for sure that I've shown all the fills (I think I forgot to show the Peat bog for a start), here is a compilation of several screen shots showing the 33 I've done all together as they are right now.
Sorry about the gap in the middle of the fourth row. I missed a bit!
In case anyone is wondering why the Arable fields and the vegetable gardens have a white background, this is because they would have had a paper background, except that placing paper on paper on different sheets when there is an Edge Fade Inner sheet effect on the upper one can confuse the rendering engine and cause what we call 'Transparency Acne', which are apparent 'holes' in the upper fill. To avoid this issue these fills are used on sheets with a Blend Mode set to Multiply. This removes all the white from the fill and leaves only the coloured parts set on the background paper texture.
As I see it, once the Parkland fill is done I have only the Freshwater marsh and the Pleasure gardens to do (and I think the pleasure gardens are more of a coloured polygon thing than a fill). After that its the symbols. I'm looking forward to that bit now I've got my drawing hand in tune :)
I haven't ruled out attempting a Coppiced woodland fill. I will have a think about it - another look to see if I can pick out any details that will make it significantly different to the Woodland scrub fill.
Sue, appreciating that this may well be accurate to the original, but the Parkland fill looks rather cluttered compared to the other woodland and grassland, etc., options. At its current scale, the trees look smaller and not quite so "stalky" - i.e. with long, bare trunks - as I'd half-thought they might from the previous key samples. It almost seems as if it's shown to a different scaling to the other fills here.
The Parkland fill is a tricky one. Here are a few extracts that show just how variable the texture is on the original. All these have been screen shot at the maximum zoom, so they are directly comparable in scale.
And the one I am working from (which I found myself on the Ferraris map)
[Image_13440]
As you can see, some of the examples have trees of similar size to the trees beyond the parkland, and some are much smaller.
I think the last two shots show something that is more comprehendible as a parkland than some of the others, but unfortunately I did not capture any of the surrounding trees in the example I found and can't remember which of the nearly 300 maps I got it from.
I am currently experimenting with a less geometric arrangement of the trees, so I might as well experiment with different sizes too.
Found the original untrimmed sample I took, and it looks like the trees in that section are generally a little smaller than in other places because the parkland trees are about the same size as the small trees I prepared for the orchard fills and lines of trees. They are not as large as the trees of the Deciduous forest, but that was expected. Those are the largest trees on the map if you don't count the lovely (and much better drawn) isolated trees and bushes that seem to have been the way each cartographer secretly 'signed' his piece.
[Image_13441]
There also seems to be a huge range of scale apparent if you look closely at the smaller geometric bits of the pattern near the bottom of the sample. Maybe I need to do "Parkland large" and "Parkland small", since they are so drastically different.
This is the second draft, in which I have enlarged the trees to be comparable with the small trees (slightly smaller than the forest trees), and made the arrangement more random in nature.
In this screen shot you see the extract I'm working from on the left, my version on the right, and the relative size of the current Deciduous forest fill for a comparison of tree size.
Thanks very much, Sue. I hunted around on a few maps randomly picked, but couldn't find any suitable Parkland samples to cite as comparisons; hence I didn't...
It looks as if the only defining feature is actually that "grainy" background texture, given quite a few seem to have trees no different to the "usual" woodland styles found elsewhere. Presumably, each cartographer just drew what they felt like at the time, or maybe forgot the Parkland trees were meant to look different. Then again, as I mentioned a while back, maybe they were simply trying to draw something similar to what was really there, and that was genuinely different in different parklands.
Maybe instead of trying to do Parkland fills at two different scales, you could do one with the trees and one without, so people could add individual trees or tree groups as necessary for the smaller areas? (Or indeed for larger ones if a specific formal layout was required.) This also assumes suitably various of the trees/tree groups will be available separately as symbols, of course.
LOL! Wyvern - I have tree symbols coming out of my ears at this end. One of the issues I've had (which is still slightly apparent in that tiny enlarged snippet of the Deciduous forest fill shown above) is trying to keep the linework consistent between different pieces. The ground lines in that fill are semi-transparent on the background green to match all the other ground fills. I decided to do this with the ground textures because the lines were too heavy on the example map. This worked nicely... until I started pasting tree symbols onto the fill with their 100% opacity outlines. Now I need to go back and reduce those outlines to make them look like they were drawn at the same time as the lines on the ground underneath the trees.
Well, there's still a lot of work to do, but it won't be too much bother to add a Parkland background fill to the set. Though I have to be careful here, since all these fills (with the exception of the Arable ones) are 3000 px fills to cope with the rather odd scale this map is compared with the standard city scale template its on. Now I can reduce the number of colours to 64k (instead of however many millions of colours full colour is) without damaging their appearance, all 33+ fills come to around 300MB. Its ok right now, but I'd better not do too many more or you will be bashing me over the head about the download size.
I've tried to jiggle the legend into a more reasonable shape than thin and extremely long. Its a bit easier to see how far I've got with it all now. All bar one of the fills are done - the Marsh fill. That is, they are done except if anyone thinks they look wrong in any way.
Once I've got the Marsh fill sorted out I will move onto the symbols.
Have you devised a specific new Footpath line-style (i.e. one that will actually stay as clear dots for once), or is it just a variant on the existing dotted/broken line drawing tools (so it's in the lap of the gods whether it stays like how it's meant to look or not)?
For the two Road styles (not the Sunken one), the Unpaved one seems to me to stand out better than the Paved one, but I realise you may be constrained by the original for what's possible with these.
That's a standard dashed line. I've rounded the corners on it by using very short dashes (1:9 with the gaps) and adding an outer glow as wide as the dashes themselves. The way an outer glow works it automatically rounds the corners off, and if the dash is only as long as it is wide the square block becomes a circle.
And you are right - the road styles are dictated by the original. I really don't like the dark stroke down the side of the track, but since I've had the privilege of choosing between all the different individual styles for everything else I'll stay faithful on the basic law that all unpaved roads need to have one. However, remember that there is no reason that you have to stick with that rule once you start to map. It will be easy to use only the paved roads and just vary the width of the line to indicate a different state ;)
I'm not completely happy with this one because it just doesn't feel right, but here is a sample of the first draft of the final texture - the marsh fill.
Better, in the sense of 'cleaner', but the shadow around the water, and the yellow murky shading not present whereas it is in the original and your first draft. So on balance, I think the first is truer to the map, and pretty good anyway.
i agree the reeds are much better. But the water needs more of the yellow murky at least (IMO - you are a much much better artist than me, so take IMO with however much salt you need)
Oh that's just a colour thing. I can do that again no problem. It was the inking I didn't get anywhere near right the first time around, but I'm quite pleased with the new reeds I did. The other bit of the inking - the grassy tufts - have to be like that to stay with the style of the previously drawn pasture texture. There are about a million very scratchy horizontal lines to be drawn yet under the reeds, but I can't seem to get any of my digital pens to imitate a scratchy old quill.
Comments
I should confess a hidden agenda! Feedback helps to guide progress. It's like audience participation. If everyone screams 'NO!' at me I find another way
[Image_13426]
I rather suspect the vineyard fill (while an absolute match for the specimen I took from the original Ferraris map) may be a little on the dark side compared to the rest of the set.
Comments and suggestions welcome
[Image_13427]
Thank you very much, Remy!
It is a lot easier for me than it was for them. I don't have to work with the natural inconsistencies and absorbency of rag paper (even the best quality was nowhere near as good as modern art paper), and they never had copy, paste, and CTRL+Z No I hadn't! What a brilliant idea
I will try that later, when I've finished the Parkland fill.
I always wanted to be a traditional cartographer, but I would have needed to have been born male and about 250 years earlier than I was to have taken part in project like this.
Just so I know for sure that I've shown all the fills (I think I forgot to show the Peat bog for a start), here is a compilation of several screen shots showing the 33 I've done all together as they are right now.
Sorry about the gap in the middle of the fourth row. I missed a bit!
I haven't ruled out attempting a Coppiced woodland fill. I will have a think about it - another look to see if I can pick out any details that will make it significantly different to the Woodland scrub fill.
All suggestions and analysis welcome :)
The Parkland fill is a tricky one. Here are a few extracts that show just how variable the texture is on the original. All these have been screen shot at the maximum zoom, so they are directly comparable in scale.
[Image_13430]
[Image_13431]
[Image_13432]
[Image_13433]
[Image_13434]
[Image_13435]
[Image_13436]
[Image_13437]
[Image_13438]
Here is the example from the second key
[Image_13439]
And the one I am working from (which I found myself on the Ferraris map)
[Image_13440]
As you can see, some of the examples have trees of similar size to the trees beyond the parkland, and some are much smaller.
I think the last two shots show something that is more comprehendible as a parkland than some of the others, but unfortunately I did not capture any of the surrounding trees in the example I found and can't remember which of the nearly 300 maps I got it from.
I am currently experimenting with a less geometric arrangement of the trees, so I might as well experiment with different sizes too.
[Image_13441]
There also seems to be a huge range of scale apparent if you look closely at the smaller geometric bits of the pattern near the bottom of the sample. Maybe I need to do "Parkland large" and "Parkland small", since they are so drastically different.
In this screen shot you see the extract I'm working from on the left, my version on the right, and the relative size of the current Deciduous forest fill for a comparison of tree size.
Thank you, Barliman!
Nice to see you around again :)
It looks as if the only defining feature is actually that "grainy" background texture, given quite a few seem to have trees no different to the "usual" woodland styles found elsewhere. Presumably, each cartographer just drew what they felt like at the time, or maybe forgot the Parkland trees were meant to look different. Then again, as I mentioned a while back, maybe they were simply trying to draw something similar to what was really there, and that was genuinely different in different parklands.
Maybe instead of trying to do Parkland fills at two different scales, you could do one with the trees and one without, so people could add individual trees or tree groups as necessary for the smaller areas? (Or indeed for larger ones if a specific formal layout was required.) This also assumes suitably various of the trees/tree groups will be available separately as symbols, of course.
Well, there's still a lot of work to do, but it won't be too much bother to add a Parkland background fill to the set. Though I have to be careful here, since all these fills (with the exception of the Arable ones) are 3000 px fills to cope with the rather odd scale this map is compared with the standard city scale template its on. Now I can reduce the number of colours to 64k (instead of however many millions of colours full colour is) without damaging their appearance, all 33+ fills come to around 300MB. Its ok right now, but I'd better not do too many more or you will be bashing me over the head about the download size.
Once I've got the Marsh fill sorted out I will move onto the symbols.
[Image_13451]
Have you devised a specific new Footpath line-style (i.e. one that will actually stay as clear dots for once), or is it just a variant on the existing dotted/broken line drawing tools (so it's in the lap of the gods whether it stays like how it's meant to look or not)?
For the two Road styles (not the Sunken one), the Unpaved one seems to me to stand out better than the Paved one, but I realise you may be constrained by the original for what's possible with these.
That's a standard dashed line. I've rounded the corners on it by using very short dashes (1:9 with the gaps) and adding an outer glow as wide as the dashes themselves. The way an outer glow works it automatically rounds the corners off, and if the dash is only as long as it is wide the square block becomes a circle.
And you are right - the road styles are dictated by the original. I really don't like the dark stroke down the side of the track, but since I've had the privilege of choosing between all the different individual styles for everything else I'll stay faithful on the basic law that all unpaved roads need to have one. However, remember that there is no reason that you have to stick with that rule once you start to map. It will be easy to use only the paved roads and just vary the width of the line to indicate a different state ;)
[Image_13454]
Can't see any messages, sorry!
Better? Worse?
[Image_13465]
Bad news - I hated it so much it no longer exists.