Fantasy maps and mapmaking tutorials by Jonathan Roberts
All the maps posted in blog posts.
In Season 5 Episode 5, Tyrion and Jorah Mormont are heading to Meereen by boat. That’s a careful choice on Jorah’s part, but it goes horribly wrong when they detour through Valyria, in the shadow of the Doom.
So, why go through Valyria? And where is Valyria in context to the rest of Essos?
The Free City of Braavos lies at the North Western tip of Essos, directly across the Narrow Sea from the Vale, and North East of King’s Landing. Here’s a map to orient Braavos to the rest of the events in Game of Thrones.
This is a sketch, based on the maps of Lands of Ice and Fire, but with just the core locations of interest pulled out.
Dorne lies at the southern end of Westeros, towards the eastern end. It shares the south coast with Old Town. As you can see from the map, the bulk of Dorne lies south of Kings Landing, and southeast of Highgarden.
This was an old sketch with ballpoint pen in the back of a pad of paper. Recently I pulled this into photoshop to do a little tidying up, and ended up adding a touch of colour and shade.
This tutorial covers my entire process for how to draw a map – from start to finish. In this case I’m illustrating a simple town map, but the steps apply to any map. Continue reading “How to draw a map”
One of the wonderful side effects of living in New York is the chance to run into great people from Tor.com. I’m now part of a semi-regular D&D game, and I draw the party dungeon maps.
Continue reading “D&D Dungeon Maps from Game Night at Tor.com”
It’s always fun to try something new, but in this case the something new was a sci fi galaxy map, and the client was Overbrook Entertainment, and Will Smith. The brief was to create 4 maps for the expanded universe around the movie After Earth. There are a bunch of books and graphic novels associated with the film. Those stories had been written in parallel with the movie development and each had added something to the geography of the universe.
One of the writers on the expanded universe material was an old RPG hand, and noticed that what the worldbuilding needed was reference maps – of the universe, solar system, world, and key city. And so I got a call.
This is definitely the week of mountain ranges. I had a question on reddit on how to draw mountain ranges that go east-to-west rather than north to south. Here’s a very quick tutorial on the difference. If you want to go deeper into the north-south version, check out this earlier tutorial on mountain ranges.
The hotizontal version is very similar – with a few tweaks. Continue reading “How to draw a horizontal mountain range”
It’s often easier to show how to illustrate a feature on a map, rather than describe it, so here’s how I illustrate a mountain range for fantasy maps:
I hope that sheds some light on the process!
I’ve written up a couple of tutorials before on drawing isometric mountain ranges for fantasy maps – but never more than the pen and ink stage. I’ve had a few requests for how to take this to the next step and colour the mountain ranges.
Note that I use a graphics tablet. You can do this with a mouse and low opacity brushes, but tablets are getting good and relatively cheap. I’d recommend picking up something like the Bamboo Splash if you’re going to be playing around with illustrating maps.
Here’s a quick walkthrough of the four steps I take in my mountain ranges. Continue reading “How to draw, shade, and colour a mountain range”
