Topographic Map Art Inkscape Tutorial

i'm rick johansen and this is iron echo design this inkscape tutorial is by request i definitely appreciate everyone that watches and for your comments and suggestions this came up a couple times people asking if we could do topographic map art and if you've been following along on the channel you know i love doing maps i thought it's a perfect union of art and science and so we'll do this one today this is sicily we're not going to actually draw the relief i'll show you an open source free resource where we can get the relief data but i will show you some tools and settings inside of inkscape that you can use to make this for yourself i do want to say before we begin there might be some better software options 3d rendering software blender even photoshop they could tackle this but i'm up for the challenge and i put this tutorial together step by step to showcase inkscape's capabilities and maybe give you some tools to throw into your arsenal so let's begin if you want to follow along on the welcome screen i am on the template a4 210 millimeters by 297 millimeters we're not going to use this space but if you have it set to this then your screen size and ratio will look the same if you're gonna play along so let's go with the order well first we'll make a project area i'll show you where to get the map data for free we'll extract a main shape using of all things the paint bucket tool then i'll show you some lighting and coloring options you can do built in we'll do a granular overlay and finally a couple drop shadow options you can use we'll throw it all together all right so i want to start with the project area this is something you can use for even if you're doing like a logo or some other type of graphic sometimes you just want a background to lay it on top of there's a couple basic ways you could have a flat color you could do a linear gradient or even a radial gradient but the next level up which is super easy is called a mesh gradient the mesh gradient i'll show you lets you have many stops in different directions and bend it if you've never used any gradient before this is how it works i've got my object here it's a yellow rectangle i'm on fill fill and stroke menu if you don't have it it says paint brush thing in the corner or go to object fill and stroke over here is linear gradient click on that and if you click the pencil you get this bar you have a start color and an end color or in this case a starting opacity full opacity down here if i click on the circle the opacity goes away so there's full opacity there is full transparency but you can change the colors to anything your heart desires now you can move it in different directions but you want to bend it or at least intuitively you want to bend it i can double click and make another stop add a different color in there but you can't bend it and you're limited to just a linear direction hence the name linear gradient let's get out of there go back to regular fill and choose any type of light gray you can go winnie background for your map if you want to play along i'll just go with this gray and to make the mesh gradient over here there's a tool it's called create and edit meshes click on that and if you left mouse click and just drag anywhere inside of your rectangle you get these bars an x-axis a y-axis and a whole perimeter each diamond if you look closely lets you change the color see that let's change this one something there just for the example and you see these arrows this lets you bend where your gradient goes thank you let's clean this up though so let's get rid of the strokes on stroke x out of that and if you lose your bars just click on it again double click and they'll come back up i want to have white in the center so i'll click the center diamond choose white i do want to make sure i'm on full opacity when i use white because if i make white by going full transparency it'll look fine now but if i take this project outside of inkscape you'll have all sorts of problems so let's go with full opacity white in the center i'll click on my perimeters i'm going to cheat and use the gray i did before i have a diamond down here i'll make that lighter i'll go with this center diamond lighter i'll pull the middle off center and see how that looks i mean it's subtle but it does make a difference we're going to drop something on top of it so let's move on there's your backdrop now let's get the map in doing my research for this video there are some very nice sites out there that give you the topographic map data with the relief 3d views bird's eye views but they weren't free or at least didn't say explicitly we could all use these for personal or commercial purposes and that's part of the theme of this channel is i want to show you tools and things you can use in your own projects i did find mapsforfree.com and they say specifically that this data can be used under the creative commons license and even for commercial purposes it looks like they source their data from nasa the national geospatial intelligence agency the department of defense and the german and italian space agencies so we appreciate their work let's go to the site here we are at maps dash 4-free.com a beautiful picture of our earth showing some nice relief up here there's some choices you can select the country i'll do italy it doesn't zoom in that much it'll center upon it so there's italy we want sicily here we go and some more choices over here in the upper right hand corner the default at least for me it shows all the rivers but i don't want those so i will unclick water you can play with it and click on streets to show you the different main roads if you're trying to isolate an exact area i'll keep the streets off i did notice down here openstreetmap is probably providing that info and thanks to them they've helped us in previous videos now i've learned from some of these nice free sites which we appreciate sometimes there's a download option which there is here so click download it'll give us a nice png save that in any place of your choice we're going to pull that into inkscape however for the space star chart maps we've done sometimes the download function gets taken away so if you can't do an automatic download you can still do a screen capture so open up your favorite screen capture software and take the portion of the map that you want this is the backup version if they ever take away that little download button either way we're taking a png file that we're gonna put into inkscape and customize it so let's do that when you're back on your canvas drag in your png file you'll get a dialog box you want to take the image dpi from file and image rendering mode we'll do none okay there's sicily that we brought in i think i'll scale it a little larger if i hold shift and control it'll keep the proportions together you may have more room on your canvas i can't full screen my inkscape because of the screen recorder all right we've come to a very common application here how do you clip out a background of a png image or for our purposes how do we isolate the island of sicily inkscape gives us a couple ways to do this and i actually have a dedicated video how to remove the background of an image on this channel if you want to check that out that's using the method of taking the bezier pen and drawing an outline around the whole shape and then using it to clip it out so if you want to learn how to do that check that out if it's a landlocked town or country that you picked you're going to have to use that method but we're using an island so we're going to go with the advanced easy is what i'm calling it way to remove a background it's with the paint bucket which in the past i've called it the tool of confusion but it's kind of growing on me so this is a great instance of where it will work very well one of the areas of confusion when you start with paint bucket is it's going to adopt the fill and stroke of whatever you were doing last so sometimes when you're building a project you're not sure what you're on you're trying to paint bucket it does something else or it doesn't behave the way you want it and you don't really feel like you have control of the tool so let's start by setting the fill and stroke so i'll just grab a rectangle and see what we're using i've got a green rectangle and i don't want a stroke on it paint bucket is going to let us quickly select an area rather than go around and trace the whole item and it's going to dump out this green but we can't use the default settings this is the defaults up here the default is it's going to fill in by visible colors threshold 15 grow and shrink zero close gaps none this is what we want to do so we're going to fill in all of the blue on our image threshold 15 is fine but i want to grow it or shrink it by one pixel because if i zoom in this isn't the best quality png but it is good for the artistic purposes we're using it for okay you ready for some paint bucket magic gone are the days of tracing it manually with bezier pen watch this all i'm going to do is push it once no joke i'm not kidding it's a good tool if you're interested in seeing a dedicated tutorial on it i'm thinking about making it just let me know in the comments i'll go back to selector tool and this is what we made the beauty of vector graphics vectors let us see the nodes so if i just double click on it there's all my nodes i want this negative space but it's blank right but because i'm working with a vector all i have to do is delete out these outside nodes and what was once negative becomes my path i'm going to draw a bounding box around these nodes to select them and delete do you see what just happened there we took the selection that paint bucket gave us and then we just inversed it by deleting the outside nodes and we're left with the shape that we need to stamp out that relief before i do that though i'm going to use this a couple more times i'll do ctrl d to duplicate it we'll put a couple of these aside we'll use those in a minute or two let's get back to stamping out our relief i've clicked on our paint bucket isolation there i hold shift i get the original png object clip set look at that time for some adjustments i want to alter this into a surreal color palette and we'll start with i'll show you how to do the lighting and contrast click on the item up here you'll see filters color now there's been some confusion under extensions there's also a color choice but we want to be under filter color and go down to lightness contrast if i click live preview it'll show you these settings that i used last which looks like this not what we want but a good habit i've gotten into rather than just start from this ugliness and try to make changes here zero it out just hit zero and zero and that brings you to the original and from here it's a lot easier to see what the modifications do so there's a plus four let's go plus two on contrast and make it a little bit darker negative two anything that looks good for you we're gonna drop a color filter on this next and i'm trying to get some good black values and some good darkness contrast in the mountains here when you have it the way you like it click apply for the color overlay i normally go to filters color and simple blend but there is a pretty cool feature here right above simple blend you see quadratone fantasy click that again you get your slider bars here i'm going to zero these out by pulling them down to nothing the choices we have the top slider is for hue distribution the next is for colors the first blend option you can do normal multiply or screen go to screen and the second blend option same thing let's keep it on screen and if i click live preview it's going to do this it turns it into looks like mold we don't want that so let's just play with it first take the hue distribution and if it's not actively there it went that time it doesn't actively change unclick live preview then re-click live preview sometimes the computing power isn't there to do it in real time this is the quadratone fantasy filter and i can kind of see where it got its name definitely some interesting looks you can get here when i was practicing with this earlier i actually chose a zero for hue distribution instead i did the color slider that's a nice minty landscape i think i did a hundred that's it right there i like this blue brown we're gonna change this to more yellow in a second and for over saturation same thing just see what it looks like this is a .29 maybe that's too vibrant we'll go down to 0.20 leave it at that once you have it the way you like it just push apply i think i do want to show you while we're here the filter i use more often which is filter color simple blend this is a lot more intuitive you can either do a normal filter which turns the whole thing that color like that this is the opacity slider so if you're in a pinch and you want to just have a new whole backdrop one color you can use the normal blend mode another one that i use quite a bit is just color that's going to re-colorize everything i'll show you one more overlay is probably the most useful click on that now that's not a good overlay color but if i want to have it maybe a slightly more orangish yellow see so that could be kind of cool actually we could go with that if you want should we keep this are we going to keep this yes i'm going to screenshot this for future you never know what's going to come up that's why i like having a quick workflow because spontaneity happens should we keep this nah back to the plan i wanted to show you how to turn this part yellow without doing a full filter like that just grab the bezier pen and draw a shape over the area that you want to have a little bit of your own blend that's the fill color we had before let's change that fill to an orangish yellow like that down here on my opacity slider it already was at 57 maybe i'll keep it there blend mode very similar to that filter that was called simple blend you can also change how an object on top of another item affects the one below it so watch this we want to go with overlay right like that now that's too harsh if i move it around you can see it just kind of burns it out but if i go to blur that's what i wanted i just thought that's like a nice feature i wanted to show you the next enhancement we're going to do is a granular overlay and i want to highlight this because it works well with the built-in setting that inkscape gives us remember this we kept one of the original shapes because we're going to use it as a direct overlay right now as you see it it's an ugly green if you're on fill let's first go to full opacity over here this one right there pattern click on that and you get some bars you want to scroll down to one of them is called sand click there and this is way too grainy but if you zoom out you're able to change the scale of this dirt sand here so i'm going to zoom out had the zoom out way out actually if you click edit paths by node what i'm looking for is this x circle and square let's grab the x and bring it all the way back down to our item i think what's happening here is inkscape is saying oh you want to control the pattern i'll give you the controls on your workspace the original page that's our a4 setting but because i scrolled all the way down it didn't match up so if that ever happens to you zoom way out like as far as you can practically and look for your handles when you grab the x it's going to move that pattern and if you grab the square you can change the scale okay remember those blend options we just did first i'll cut the opacity go down to 37 36 something in there and the blend mode let's go back to overlay all i'm trying to do is give it a little bit of grit a little bit of granular texture on the flats here zoom in so you can see the difference see how it's flat just looks blank right here in this valley if you just add a little bit of texture i think it helps with the overall look now our shape that we made that overlay with works pretty well let's say it didn't i can click on it and go to path dynamic offset and i'll see a little diamond here this is going to shrink it down in perfect proportion if i just use the regular handles and trinket it won't work uniformly and some of it will go into the bay here i'll do shift and control and just come down a touch leave it at that let's group the whole thing together so we can do our finishing touches here i'll click out in no man's land and come around everything control g will group it now let's add the drop shadow inkscape does have a basic drop shadow function it's under filters shadows and glows drop shadow but it looks a little cheesy for this purpose now if i go to live preview hey now just it just looks like it's floating like a science project so let's not use this one we'll close out of that instead i'll use the other pre-made thing we had here and we'll slice it so we only put the drop shadow where we want it maybe just right here actually we'll do it just right here and i'll show you a different way for down in this part let's make some space let's duplicate it one more time just in case we need it again change the opacity back to full and i'll clip just this part right here get my bezier pen tool to build a clipping shape collect both of them so i held shift to get both of them together path intersection this will go underneath the eastern seaboard part we'll make a regular blur with that this i want to show something different though when i was practicing i thought it looked cool to have this part be darker than that so let's clip everything except that half and we're going to darken this area with the blend the top one selected hold shift the bottom one selected path difference there we go let's change this to a black and our blend mode will be overlay and then we'll blur it i could have been more precise with that maybe had to come up here into the valley but i wanted to have a little bit differentiation between the blues over here and the blues down there plus i'm going to drop a shadow here so that's why this shadow blur will be okay now it's time for this one drop it to the bottom add a blur drop the opacity down maybe a touch not bad there's one more thing i want to show it's one more what i call advanced easy the regular blurry just hit the blur on the slider down here but i want to blur it more with the horizontal and not as much vertical so to do that i can grab my bezier pen i'll draw the random shadow area that i want start with full opacity and go up to filters blurs blur and you get this slider box which lets you control how much of the blur is horizontal and how much of the blur is vertical so let's start out by zeroing it out let's go with more horizontal blur yeah that's what i want i wanted those striations in there maybe go to 20 something and vertical just a touch maybe three maybe a two 2 is fine apply go to selector go to hierarchy and drop it underneath and we can play with our opacity here once you have it the way you like it go to edit paths by node and now you can move it where you think it'll look good let's group this whole thing together ctrl g drop it on to our the first thing we did i made this off camera the label so you know where it is but there you have it there is a way you can take that relief data from maps for free.com drop some color filters on it put it on the background add some shadows and call it a day

Channel: IronEcho Design

Views: 15,418

Keywords: Topographic, Iron Echo, IronEcho, Rick Johanson, Map Art, Relief

Id: DnqtnSTe6qM

Length: 19min 54sec (1194 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 06 2022