Northern Front Range, CO
(Created 2005)
I created this large basemap for the purpose of generating multiple small-scale arterial maps of various cities in the area (sometimes with overlapping coverage areas). CDoT data was good enough for this scale, and they were also a good source for public land areas.
Rather than creating a giant shaded-relief image for the entire area (which would've been prohibitively large), I created several images customized for specific coverages, and put them on layers which get turned on only when generating the corresponding map.
Because many of the city limit and public land polygons were quite complex, I had to come up with a new method of colorizing the shaded relief. Instead of using a grayscale image and colorizing it with transparent lenses in FreeHand, for this project I imported the polys into Photoshop and used the opacity feature to create a single raster file that contains all of the colorized polys as well as the shaded relief.
