Hi Everyone! :)

I'm officially working on the March issue of the 2022 Cartographer's Annual issue, called Winter Village, but while its the Holiday season I took a short break to work on another idea I had some time back, and started to play with making a style that mimicked the effect of painting a map on canvas in oils.

I haven't got that far yet, and it will take a lot of time to finish anything like a mapping style, but I have sorted out a basic colour scheme.

Please say what you like about it, since I am still at the stage where I can change the textures before I work on the matching symbols.

Find out which sheet the map border is on. This is quite separate to any decorative element visible in the map and usually hidden somewhere underneath something else. The technical map border is often on the BACKGROUND sheet, but that's not a hard and fast rule, so to find it open the layers dialog and make the MAP BORDER layer active and hide all the rest. Apply, and you should see it. Then you can use List from the Info menu to find out which sheet the actual map border is on.

Once you know which sheet it's on, show all the layers again (except the TEMPLATE layer, which should be both frozen and hidden), pick another layer as active (BACKGROUND is good), and freeze the MAP BORDER layer to protect it.

For that Options checkbox to work you will need to have whichever sheet the technical map border is on visible.

Here is a dungeon map I made recently. I have used an Outer Glow instead of an ordinary glow in this case, and then a Blend Mode instead of a straightforward transparency. The Outer Glow is very similar to the Glow, but has slightly different properties that allow it to be used in conjunction with the Blend Mode. The Blend mode works in a similar way to the blend mode setting on a layer in PS or any other bitmap app.

You could copy these effects across from my map to your own and play with them if they aren't quite right.

I've also posted a rendered export of this map, in case you had any red Xs. The style is Dungeon's of Schley - SS4

1" = 5 feet = 1 grid square.

I believe it is either the same, or has some of the same content.

Tech Support is aware of your issues and is currently working on resolving the problem, however there may be a slightly longer wait than usual owing to the Christmas period.