Turning a map into an aged paper handout

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The key to a good map is the information it presents. As soon as you’ve done the line drawing on a map, it should be perfectly possible to pick it up and use it. Everything after that point is polish to make it pretty. But polish matters, especially when you’re trying to set the scene.

Here’s how to take a simple map on a white background and turn it into an aged paper handout.

Finding an aged paper background

First of all you need a good paper texture. There are thousands of these free on the internet. As always, www.cgtextures.com is a good bet, under Paper->Plain. You can also find hundreds of paper textures on deviantArt.com (just search for “paper texture”).

Or you can use this one of mine for free (CC-NC-SA). It’s 6000px by 6000px so there’s a lot of room to maneuver:

Free background texture, CC-NC-SA licensed.

Adding the map to the parchment background

With this in hand it’s a quick hop to a pretty map:

1. Take your original map – here we have a simple 3 colour map with a couple of locations marked with crosses. It’s useful, but not that atmospheric. You can use a simple pen and paper line art map at this stage. You can even take a picture of a paper map with your phone as the starting point.
2. Add a parchment background as a layer behind the map. You won’t see it initially (the white background blocks it out) so change the blend mode of your map layer to multiply. This only darkens, so the white background will disappear. Drop the opacity of the layer to 50% to give a light watercolour look.
3. The 50% multiply layer is a little washed out, and we want to darken the lines and bump up the colours. To do this, duplicate the layer and set the blend mode to colour burn. This will boost the colours and burn in the dark lines – and once again the white is transparent for this blend mode.. I’ve set it to 70% opacity.

Play with the opacity of the two blend modes to get a look that you like. You can also use colour and saturation blend modes with this to build up a nice effect. And just like that you have an aged paper hand out. Much easier than tea staining or baking a hand drawn map, and with less chance of setting fire to the oven.

The post Turning a map into an aged paper handout appeared first on Fantastic Maps.

from Planet GS via John Jason Fallows on Inoreader http://ift.tt/1ODmAuy
Jon

John Jason Fallows

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