Here’s the breakdown of how I draw lineart for swamps. Continue reading
How to Draw Swamps
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Tag Archives: gimp
Converting a Phone Photo to Digital Line Art
Lots of people are jumping into the #fridayfiveminutemap and posting phone snaps of their maps. A couple have asked how to take a picture of their map and clean it up a little. This mini tutorial should help with that. The basic idea also works for cleaning up scans, and the techniques are useful in a whole range of places (you can find a version of this geared to Gimp users here).
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How To Draw Forests
The dark and foreboding wood is a staple of fantasy literature and our own folklore. Continue reading
A Note on Background Textures
This is less a tutorial, and more a note following last week’s post on drawing grasslands. The result of that tutorial strongly depend upon the background texture used and I wanted to highlight that with this post.
Lunchtime Tips: Blend Modes
Blend modes are a wonderful feature of Photoshop, and also appear in many other programs, including Gimp. Here’s a few I use regularly. I’ve taken the same styles o text and shown how they appear using the different blend modes. Further down, you can see the effect of using a selection of different gradients and setting them to the relevant blend mode. There’s a breakdown of each blend mode after the jump.
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How to colour quick trees for RPG maps
Today I’m walking through my method for colouring trees quickly for RPG maps. This follows on from this mini-tute/discussion on different tree styles from last week. I’m working with style 1 from that tutorial here, though it can be directly applied to the other styles just as easily.
The problem with trees is the leaves. Continue reading
How to make a grunge brush – Gimp
How to Colour a Dungeon Map
How do you take a line art map like this one and colour it up? An isometric map is a little trickier than a top down map. As there aren’t hard edges for the walls it’s tricky to set up a selection and stroke the selection or use filters to define walls and floor styles. So I do it by hand. And here’s the steps I use. Continue reading
Weekly tips 3 – Dungeons! Using Layer Effects, Stroking Walls and Going Old School TSR Blue
This week it’s all about the dungeon, and I’ve been covering ways of creating dungeon maps without actually drawing anything. These tips should work whether you’re a natural doodler or you think pencils are the devil incarnate.
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Weekly Tips 2 – How to design a gatehouse, using grids and building isometric maps
Castle Defence – a classic gatehouse
Castles are built for more than one reason – people live there, guards are stationed there and often they are political power centers for the region. But first and foremost they are built to keep people out. Continue reading