So close…

…but I’m going cross-eyed so I have to stop for the day! This is the map of Vokhtah at about 95% complete, if you don’t count the rest of the globe. 😀

The map is HUGE, but you don’t know how huge until you start zooming in, like so:

And then, because I’ve worked my butt off on this, we’ll zoom in a little bit more…

See that waterfall? Pinky looking thing almost dead centre of the pic? That small, not-so-important image is made up of a photo of a lake that I vectored in Corel, layered with transparent textures, reworked a number of times to make the textures blend into the background in Inkarnate…and all that’s before I made the actual fall of water. Just a tad pleased with myself. lol

Okay, enough crowing. Inkarnate is a fabulous graphics tool that’s worth every cent of the measly $5/month subscription. Like all tools though, the more you try to get out of the software, the more you have to learn. For example, to turn that picture of a lake into a usable ‘stamp’ [that’s what the graphic objects are called], I had to work out how to avoid having a nasty white edge all around the vectored image.

Without going into a full-blown how-to, these are the basic steps:

1. I found an image of a meteorite that had a great texture:

2. I cut out small sections of the texture and made them almost transparent:

3. Next, I made a background colour that would make the texture blend in to the background colour of the Inkarnate map:

4. Then, I placed the vectored image of the lake onto the top layer of images, grouped all three and exported them as a .jpeg image.

5. Finally, I uploaded the new ‘stamp’ to Inkarnate and spent a few more hours finessing the placement so there would be no straight edges to betray where my custom stamp had gone. Oh…and then I had to get the waterfall right, but luckily there were some nice ready made stamps for that.

The map still needs the trade routes pathed in, and labels, and a legend to explain what all the brightly coloured bits are, but that’s a job for tomorrow. Have a great weekend everyone, and remember to stay safe!

love,
Meeks