Celebrating Small Victories (Plus Gaming Maps from Clouds)

The past few weeks have not been the greatest. Nothing is seriously wrong, just lots of little things that have added up. So while nothing has been completely resolved we are making progress so I wanted to use this post to focus on the positive parts of things.

Last week I talked about the fact that I caught poison ivy while trying to mow our backyard. It still needs mown. I'm embarrassed to say exactly how badly it needs work. However my husband and I have made plans to get it taken care of, hopefully by this Sunday. Also my poison ivy is almost cleared up.

We still don't know for sure what caused our hall to flood in the rain, but there has been enough sun that our lawn doesn't have standing water in it anymore. We are still trying to figure out the problem but I was finally home and awake while it rained overnight. It seems like cleaning the gutters out more at least helped. When I looked out our gutters were not overflowing and we had no standing water on the patio where everything has been flooding. Its not conclusive evidence but it is as start. We still need to figure out how to make that side of the house drain better during heavy rain.

My husband's game is going great. Everyone seems excited about it. He's been running without a map because we bought into a Kickstarter for a program called Worldspinner that allows you to input basic information about your world and then ages it. It creates and names cities based on the culture that lives there and creates a history adding details like wars. It can also add information about heroes throughout the world's history and plot hooks for each city. We only donated enough to get Beta access and it hasn't opened up yet. He was trying to hold off on making a map until it was available but the campaign is quickly moving to the point where a map is necessary. Since my cold has caused me to spend a lot of time on the couch I started working on the problem.

I don't really remember where the idea came from but at some point we had a conversation about using the shapes of trees of clouds to make a map. Both of them have irregular outlines as well as internal details that could be used to define mountain ranges or rivers. So since I've been collecting cloud photos I opened a few up in Photoshop and got to work.

This is the photo I started with.

I just zoomed in on an area and start looking for shapes to outline. I did create a new layer so that the drawing was separate from the photo.

Then I used other colors to mark interior features of the cloud that could be water or mountain ranges.

Then just keep looking for more shapes.

In the end you can delete the photo layer and just have a map left.

In ended up with six countries. They are still very rough and need more details added but its a good start. I figure we can print and cut them out so we can play around with how to arrange them into larger continents. When we do that some of the borders will have to be tweaked so things actually fit together but it sounds like a fun afternoon. I'll leave it to my husband to add in cities because he has it sort laid out in his head already.