Old World Map
June 28, 2009
There are so many free graphics and images available online that can be used for digital scrapbooking and web design. At some point especially with digital scrapbooking you will want to make your own unique images. I use Photoshop® CS as my main graphic editing software. There are many online sites dedicated to providing free Photoshop® tutorials. There are also many forums and groups for discussing Photoshop® and getting help with the various features of the program. Even with a program as powerful as Photoshop® by itself there are various add-ons, plugins, free brushes, free actions and etc that can be used to enhance the program. You can even make your own brushes as I did for my © brush. So within the program there is still more room for personal creativity. I try to work through one or two Photoshop® tutorials each week.
Pictured is my first attempt at the Old World Map tutorial from psd tuts+. This would be a cute digital scrapbooking image that can be used as an element or background or even a frame. This tutorial uses several techniques to create a fictional old world map. It was a rather easy tutorial to follow but there were a few important details left out of a couple of the steps that would make it difficult for a beginner to complete. Once I had worked through the tutorial I decided to tweak just a little. There were several layers to creating the image which is something I really like. What is nice about layers is you can easily go back and change one element of your image if you save it as a .psd file. The image is created by adding additional layers each with a technique. For example in this tutorial the landmass was created as a layer then a background layer was added and dragged below the landmass. Each time something new was added I used a new layer. To get the final ridging effect all the layers were merged then a texture filter was used. I added a page curl using AV Bros. Page Curl Pro 2.2. This is an additional filter I purchased for Photoshop® that makes customizable bends and curls on the image. That left a transparent background so I added another layer filled with white so the image would blend properly on this blog.
I like the resulting image but have a few ideas how to make it better and that's what tutorials really are all about. I'm not really happy with how the stripes turned out so would use the gradient tool instead. I definitely would keep the compass on a separate layer, turn off that layer, merge the other layers then add the texture and turn the compass layer back on. I think the map would look a bit more authentic with perhaps a burnt or ragged edging as well. There are a few suggestions in the comment section of the tutorial so I will be playing a bit more and post what I come up with!
Garden Gnome
©2006-2009
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