Face Mapping: Tips, Notes, and Things to Think About

Tools reference

Your best source of information is the Open Orienteering Mapper Manual! This is the source of information about how the software works. But in this section, I'll point you to a few specific pages and tools that are particularly handy.

The Template menu

When you opened your template, a menu popped up below the symbols:

As you map, it will be very useful to adjust the opacity and visibility of your map (the painting you're making) and your template (your selfie image).

Learn more about templates on the template manual page.

Drawing Toolbar

Read the Manual Page on the drawing toolbar to understand all the buttons at the top of the screen.

The Tools Menu also shows descriptions of those tools:

Thinking about layers

In this exercise, we're using Open Orienteering Mapper as a drawing tool, ignoring the real meaning of the symbols we're using.

However! Because this is in fact mapping software, you might have an easier time if you think a little bit about the layers of a map.

How do layers work?

Other drawing programs (notably photoshop) let you define layers of a drawing and put them in any order you want. But because of mapping convention, features drawn with certain map symbols are automatically prioritized over others:

• A man-made feature like a road, paved area, fence, etc. will typically layer on top of a vegetation feature like open land, thicket, etc.
• A water feature will layer on top of vegetation as well

For example, here is a circular water feature that is covered by a paved area:

In this image, I have layered "lake", "open land", and "paved area", and placed the same point symbols on each of the three areas:

You can only see all the point features I placed on the yellow "open land"! Green "vegetation" features disappear in the "lake", and both green and brown symbols disappear in the "paved area".

This makes sense in the context of a map. Vegetation shows a "default" cover for a large area, then other details pop out of the landscape– trails, rivers, pits, roads.

It might be helpful to choose your symbols with this in mind.

How do we use layers to advantage?

If we understand layers, we can make life a bit easier. For example, I've here used "paved area" for my hair, and an "open land" for my skin.

Initially, you might try tracing the complex outline where skin and hair meet on both symbols, like here by my ear:

As you see, it's a lot of points to manipulate, and they don't match up perfectly!

When I click out of edit mode, you can see that green and brown symbols layer on top of the beige, and there are little white gaps where the corners don't match:

I can fix this! Instead of manipulating each point on the various symbols to match up exactly, I can just make that beige outline much bigger than necessary:

This gets rid of all the gaps– I don't need to trace my ear perfectly in a symbol that's just going to be covered by another layer.

As you can see, the outline of the ear is now defined completely by the green and brown symbols.

This actually saves me quite a bit of work! It means that I don't have to make a detailed shape for a lower layer. For example, here I have a big flat line in the "rough open land" symbol I'm using for my face, because I know the hairline will be defined by the "paved area" symbol I'm using for my hair:

This is faster, leaves me with no gaps, and gives me this nice detailed result:

Tools to seek out

My number one piece of advice is to click around and see what happens!

The second piece of advice is to read the manual.

You should be able to make a pretty good self-portrait just by using the Drawing Basics outlined above. But for a really amazing portrait, here are some things you might look for:

• Fill bounded areas
• Fill/create border
• Switch dash direction
• Connect path
• Unify areas
• Cut free form hole
• Convert to curves
• Cut away from area
• Merge area holes

You can find all of these functions in the Toolbars manual page.