From the plains of Deli to the mountain ranges of Papua, a young and ambitious king sets his eye east as riches of the world are waiting for him. Crushing the Portuguese infidels in Malacca and subjugating the Javanese, his conquest as inspired both grand epics and tragedies that live to this day. He knows nothing but war until he ends his march in Papua, living under the splendors of his conquest until his passing in 1658
<--- Author's Note--->
If you guys followed my work since early 2017 then you'll know that this is not the first map I made for the subject. There are two versions: the
[simple version] and this
[convoluted piece of ****]. But believe or not, I tried to be ambitious with this project at first. I didn't just add some side content to flesh out the world and call it a day, I tried to make a map "authentic" at first but it didn't come to fruition since I'm a bit inept at first. But after years of tampering with textures and opacities, I finally get the hand with making this faux-paper aesthetic possible.
So the thing, I retread back to my old map on Anatolia, the one where
[Sultanate of Rum] survived. There, I realized that most of the atlases I have some kind of half-tones where the patterns of the print mostly consist of colorized dots. There, I tried to add it to the scene and fill it with some paper texture asset and call it a day. I was happy with it until a few weeks later after making some self-criticisms around my previous work. That leads me to this one and I try to expand it more. I don't want a simple copy on the subject, I wanna add something to it. It took me hours or even days until I realize the solution, especially after reading my atlas again. The answer is surprisingly simple, just add some two different layers and move them apart diagonally. When it comes to the obvious sharpness, I added some gaussian blur to make it mesh with the rest of the map. And I set each paper textures to different settings, one is normal while the other to multiply.
Eventually, I head back to the map and start making this thing to its peak. I've finally made the map that I wanted since my first brainstorm and I'm glad that the results are marvelous... at least for me.
Anyway, since some of y'all might be reading this, I'll link my
[DeviantArt] page if you want to check the rest of my work. And you want to make something similar, I have plans to make a video on setting the texture. But in the meantime, I have a
[basic video tutorial] on mapmaking in Inkscape. Be warned though, I used BonziBuddy to voice this thing. Too much of a coward to use my own voice... for now.
Well, that's for me. Have fun!