Hey everyone! I finally got my green Copic markers and was able to colour my big city map which has been lying around just waiting to be finished.
This map is big. It’s 10.875 by 14 inches. I scanned it in two pieces because it was too big to fit on my scanner. I had to stitch the two pieces together in Photoshop, which was actually a long laborious process with with lots of experimentation. I scanned it at 1200 DPI because I realized that scanning at 600 DPI gave me some weird scanner artifacts. Also, 1200 gives me some future flexibility.
I did some touch-ups in Photoshop, but was annoyed by the healing brush, that for some reason wasn’t doing as well as last time. Then I brought the image onto my iPad for further editing. I like my iPad because I can hold it in my lap and use the Apple Pencil. Photoshop doesn’t have as many features, however. Though the iPad Photoshop redeemed itself this time with its healing brush. It worked so much better than the version on my laptop! I use it for cleaning up bit of fuzz or yuckiness that gets picked up by the scanner. I also fix the map edges because, scanned in, they never look nice. About 3/4 of the way through touching up the map I discovered the Clone tool in Photoshop. Man, I wish I had known about this tool before! It’s so awesome and would have saved me a lot of time.
I often got errors that I did not have enough storage on my iPad to do the operation, and then Photoshop would error and kick me out of editing the image. I lost work several times because of this. VERY frustrating. My iPad Pro is a first gen one, and only has 32gb of storage. It was a test device at a previous job that I bought from the company when it went bankrupt. I’d like to get a new iPad Pro to replace this one, but I don’t have the money for that right now, so I’ll make do.
Exporting the image to PNG crashed Photoshop every time. And I tried many times. So I ended up having to export a TIFF file that I then converted to PNG on my computer.
Here are the links to the higher-res versions of this file:
300 DPI: LINK
75 DPI: LINK
I actually also have 600 DPI and 1200 DPI versions of this image, but I couldn’t upload them because they were too big! If you need them, contact me and we’ll find a way to get it to you.
I did a live stream where I was doing some of the shadows. Here’s the link. Do you guys care about this kind of stuff?
These assets are released under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. It’s pretty easy going! 🙂