antique style map of Europe, on crumpled paper

inspired by Alasdair Rae's recent parchment map

 

I've taken Alasdair's idea and tweaked it by using the texture as a displacement map. If you look closely, you'll see the grid lines and other features are distorted by the texture.

 

QGIS cartography

 

Cartography in QGIS, exported as a png from Map Composer (using default settings for A4 landscape)

 

The coast outlines were created using the Multi Ring Buffer plugin.

 

Used data-driven labels, with position and angle.

 

Used Europe Albers Equal Area Conic (EPSG:102013) with a 5 degree grid in EPSG:4326.

 

GIMP processing

 

The texture distortion was done using GIMP.

 

The texture was resized to match the qgis output.

 

I composited the texture and map output using 'Multiply' mode in the GIMP, and used 'merge down'.

 

I took the texture into GIMP, desaturated it, increased contrast with curves, used posterise (8 levels) and ran a wide-radius (50 px) Guassian Blur, then saved this as a displacement map.

 

Then took the composited textured image in GIMP, and used Filter > Map > Displace, using the displacement map in the x and y directions (I settled on 40 pixels in both directions)

 

you could go further with this technique by layering other more uniform textures...

 

Credits

 

texture: www.flickr.com/photos/chrisser/8973204461

 

font: Pharmount (available from dafont.com), free for non-commercial use

 

Done