Hello people! Yes, I’m still alive, and I hope I’m finally coming out of my lengthy befuddled phase. My brain went into meltdown after I published Taniel to KDP. All those months and months of Wattpad effort; intensive revision during Holly Lisle’s revision course; rewriting; and editing: all saw my muse go into hiding when she saw the second book being set up in yWriter5.
Now, with my second newsletter to my subscribers due in August, I suddenly found the will to start producing an official map of Corrangorach. I had promised the 450 people on my list that the map was coming soon. I kept putting it off because I wanted to use GIMP and do the map from scratch.
The other day, I popped into the Cartographers’ Guild website and found a tutorial in a style I love – ala The Hobbit. Luckily, the tutorial is worded for a complete beginner to GIMP.
After spending the last couple of days drawing multiple mountain, tree, and hill shapes, I was hugely pleased to have a play with my newly created animated brushes this morning. Pure magic to see whole mountain ranges dripping off the end of the brush! I never imagined I could do this…
OK, you can see I got carried away. At first, I didn’t notice the mountains tilting forward, freaked out as I was by the blue bits. I had an angle set. There are so may settings to watch out for.
Yesterday, I had been messing about with a blue gradient on my base map and the mountain must’ve been active underneath. Truly, I have no idea! Makes sense, though, I’ve chucked a bucket of blue over that particular mountain’s transparent background.
I’ve only drawn the one ‘house’ brush so far. It isn’t animated (meaning houses will not randomly appear as I draw across the page). I’m looking forward to doing castles, keeps, marshes, dragons, ormes (water serpents) and ships, too. It’s exciting. I’m sure that getting immersed into Corrangorach will get me keener to tackle book two.
Now, I must away and fix that blue-tainted mountain brush!
Thanks for reading.
🙂
