I’m taking a Photoshop class at NYU. Since I taught myself Photoshop, there’s a lot of tools I don’t use because I don’t know what they do. I also wanted to learn why certain tools cause a certain effect. Photoshop has a keyboard shortcut for almost every function. I’ve always wanted to learn them.
Something similar to this came out of one of my classes.
I can make my own backgrounds for image quotes! That never occurred to me.
I created this in the last class.
This isn’t a bunch of images put together. The only images are the spaceship and the moons. Everything else is me playing with gradients, filters, brush sizes/colors and other tools. Amazing what you can do with Photoshop. Outside of creating fantasy maps, I don’t do a lot of this type of creation in Photoshop. I will now.
Speaking of fantasy maps… I saw this from An Ember in the Ashes.
Suddenly, I wanted to make something like that. My maps usually look like this:
Not terrible. I’m really proud of this map. But, I wanted to try making something with texture to represent different terrains.
Just getting the land shape right was a pain. I searched Pinterest for maps to help me visualize my land.
This started as a massive blob. I used different erasers to shape the edges, making it look more like land.
Then came the mountains.
I started with this:
And hated it.
Next
The texture is better at least. I played with blending options and added water to make the edges of the mountains a little less round.
Still needs some work. At least I’m getting somewhere. I don’t care for parts of the mountain area.
Meh. This needs something. Map making, image creation in general, usually takes me days. When I reach a point where I’m not happy with it and I don’t know why, I step back for a day. I usually figure out what’s wrong with it. I like this map better than my first try.
I’ll keep you posted on my progress.
