Fantasy maps and mapmaking tutorials by Jonathan Roberts
All the maps posted in blog posts.
Often hills are indicated on a map by drawing an outline, but when you have forest on top, that outline gets obscured. So how do you draw forested hills? The trick is to use the detail of the forest to indicate the hills, rather than obscure them.
Continue reading “How to Draw Forested Hills on a Top Down Map”
I’ve realised I have a particular workflow for drawing coastlines in my maps. Here’s a quick walkthrough.
If you’ve been following along on Google+ you’ve likely seen some notes on a hex mapping project in the works. This hex mapper started as a challenge to myself over the summer when I took a holiday back to visit my parents on Skye:
Can I code a hex mapper web app during a holiday?
Continue reading “Some Sketches and Screenshots from a Work in Progress”
Not all my maps are of fantasy lands – every now and again, one comes along from the real world. Before Christmas I was asked to map the Mayacamas mountain range for Tricycle Wine Partners, a vineyard in California.
City maps are complex beasts. There’s a balance to be found between detail and time. The ideal is to be able to imply all the detail of a city, without getting lost drawing every single roof tile.
It’s good to hand over final pieces. This one went out the door today – a city map for a client. The combination of detailed line art featured locations and more anonymous shadowed buildings seems to work well.
The featured locations were all drawn at many times their final size. You lose the precise detail when the locations are shrunk down, but the combination of the details provide a sense of the structure.
Eric Quigley asked about labeling recently and that prompted me to think a little about how I actually go about labeling a map. Often it’s the last thing to get done, but it’s also the most important. A map without labels is just a pretty picture, it’s not useful. So, it’s worth taking some care getting labels right.
This is a photoshop tutorial, but these techniques are almost identical in Gimp.
Today, a quick one on isometric pen and ink mountain ranges. Continue reading “Quick Mountain Tutorial!”
This article was originally written for people building their own worlds for novel writing, but the process is useful for anyone who wants to create a world and draw a map.
Let’s get one thing out of the way right now.
A map shouldn’t be pretty.
It’s always a little daunting to take on a brand new style of map. When Steve Russell asked for an map inspired by the Orient for Heroes of the Jade Oath I took it on with some trepidation. After a ton of experimenting with textures, brushes and line-styles I came up with a version I was happy with, and this is the result!
