pirate ship – Darkcloud Xero's Online Shop

Back in 2015 I worked on a One Piece Map. And although I liked how it turned out, it was too big for me to scan it with my scanner. This led me to capture it with a camera. The problem was that I couldn’t get it quite squared and since it was buckling all over the place, it would still give me problems even if I did square it. At the time I wasn’t too good with Photoshop so I just did a quick fix, but it wasn’t that convincing.

Here is the new edited version:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/45050729932/in/dateposted-public/

I don’t know why, but I’ve always like the old map aesthetics.

Here are the original posts that contains the original process:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

And here is the process of the new digital process:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/45099649821/in/dateposted-public/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/44188906005/in/dateposted-public/

I used the puppet transform to fix the buckling that didn’t allow the map to be stretched into the edges.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/45099649591/in/dateposted-public/

After doing that, I had to make sure the edges all had the same length. But this means that there is going to be empty areas which I have to fix.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/31226305868/in/dateposted-public/

I used the old gold background to fill in the empty spaces.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/45099649421/in/dateposted-public/

After that I fixed some mistakes where the ink ran out a bit too much, I believe when I gave it a coffee wash. After that I had to fix the edges so that they meshed well.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/44379542064/in/dateposted-public/

One thing that bugged me was the size and placement of the ONE PIECE text on the right corner. So I enlarged the ONE and then moved all the text a little to the right.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/30162002517/in/dateposted-public/

That left empty spaces and obvious seems so I had to fix that. First I duplicated the One Piece banner on the bottom layer.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/30162002467/in/dateposted-public/

Then I had to go over it with the brush tool to get rid of the seams.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/31226309108/in/dateposted-public/

And this is without the fixes.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/44188911995/in/dateposted-public/

And with.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/44188913615/in/dateposted-public/

And that’s that.

I have some new artwork I did this year, but I thought I would try and update some old artwork along the way now that I have a bit more skill in editing. Though to be fair, back in the day I wanted to do it all traditional so I guess I was apprehensive about editing things digitally.

In any case.

Hasta la proxima,

-NUBE

I have finally finished this piece. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do with this one. I only had a rough idea of what I wanted. And that was having the Strawhat crews Thousand Sunny with a map as the background. Other than that, I wondered along the way how many details I should add and whether to add color or not. Both seem appealing though. Which one do you think looks best?

I decided to “age” the map with coffee. This was a technique I used once in art class back in middle school. I liked what it did, but I noticed it didn’t darken enough so I had to use some water colors mixed with the coffee water to get the darkness I wanted. Eventually I decided to actually color the map to see what I can do with my watercolor skills and see if I could give the look of aged paper.

I took a bit with this one since I had to let the paper dry. And I actually recorded this one, Which meant I had to be mindful of the batteries. The video will be up at some point or another. I have some plans for what I want to have when I make my official return to Youtube.

Anyway, I have two new pieces I want for this month. The theme? Halloween of course!

Hasta la proxima,

XERO