Drawing a Battle Map for "Scales of War" with Krita and GMIC

For the upcoming first publication (this time, really, not like that time or the time before) of Bent Goblin Press, a companion to the prelude Scales of War of Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen, I need a battle map.

Another map I needed, the home area of Rhys (the NPC who gets the whole prelude rolling for the characters) I found a wonderful map over at Dyson's, but the battle map I need to draw myself.

Luckily, with Krita and G'MIC I have to excellent tools in my quiver to help me with that.

I start out with a hand drawing

which I then open in Krita, where I start the G'MIC filter.

Then I browse to the Stamp filter (which you find under the catagory Black & White) and play around with the parameters until I like the result. The filter takes out the underlying grid, even if the grid is of a grey color rather than a blueish color (which works better -- if you try this yourself, better use blue squares on the graph paper!)

And, presto, there is our black-and-white battle map:

For coloring, I use the Colorize Lineart [Smart Coloring] filter (also under Black & White), which allows me to interactively set color points of where I want which color and then have the filter suggest a coloring, which I then correct by setting a few more of these points. For example, the color points set as in

leads to the following result:

With a few more iterations of setting coloring points and a bit of final manual corrections, I get

All that is missing now, is a hex grid, which can be easily overlaid using Krita, and I am done!

Yes, Dyson's maps are in a totally different league, but thanks to Krita and G'MIC, the result looks at least acceptable, I would say...

PS: David Revoy has two excellent articles on the GMIC Coloring filter: basic information about the filter and tips and tricks.