It can be tricky to draw water on a map. You don’t want to fill areas with a flat blue, but you also don’t want to draw every wave and ripple. The trick is to strike a balance, and provide a visual shorthand that quickly sells the presence of water. When putting this together I was thinking about Mike Schley‘s water style (shown in this map).
1. Lines
Around the edge of the water area, draw in smooth flowing lines. Draw them quickly with a sweeping motion – don’t think too hard about it. This takes a little practice, but once you’ve got the hang of it, it comes quickly. Have the lines loosely follow the edge of the water, and avoid any sharp corners
At this point you can use it as-is – black and white line maps are easy and quick to use. But if you want colour, read on.
2. Base colour
Here I’ve added a grey blue as the base (on a new layer under the lines). Once the blue is in place, I added a white highlights, on the side of the black ripple lines. I’ve added the white only to the edge away from the side of the pool. This way the ripples look like they’re heading towards shore. Add brighter highlights right along the ripple edges.
3. Extra credit
In this step I’ve added the ripple texture from earlier this week as an overlay layer at 8% opacity. I’ve also added a new overlay layer and used a large fuzzy brush set to black and low opacity to darken the deeper parts of the pool. This will darken the blue, and bump up the saturation, but leave the white highlights almost untouched.
That’s all there is to it!
Here’s a video walkthrough of how I draw water on a map:
amazing
I’m not good in english
But perfectly understood the tutorial
thanks for sharing it
congratulations for the blog
Always keep visiting
would like some tips if possible
Thank you.
hugs.
Thanks! I’m glad you liked the tutorial. Let me know what topics yo’d like to see covered in future.
Are you using photoshop? Do you think photoshop is the best program for creating maps or would you recommend any others? I know that adobe now has a pay by the month kinda thing but are there any cheaper programs that do similar things?
I do use Photoshop, but you can easily do the same with Gimp (free, so much cheaper than Photoshop). Here’s a run down of the various tools.
Thank you so much for the info I’m totally going to check it out now!
Check Affinity Photo which is proving to be a good and cheap alternative to Photoshop. It’s still in beta so some rough edges are to be expected but I really like it.
Thanks I’d like to try it but I work on a Windows based PC, I’ll keep an eye on it if they port it over. It looks very promising.
Thanks for the tips! That is pretty cool. I’ve been trying some techniques for maps but they haven’t turned out to good. This should really help. I love to toss in “water features” in many of the encounter areas I design. There is just so much you can do with water. Water can make a boring battlefield a lot of fun in a hurry.
Glad it’s helpful!
Man, you are just so good at this. I swear, I only look this stuff up once every year, and o always find myself at this site. You are great!