Fantasy maps and mapmaking tutorials by Jonathan Roberts
At the start of the month I released the Iconic Island – a map pack with an island map and a load of individual map icons indicating things like castles, cities and ruins. Today I’m covering how to create your own icons. This is a slightly longer tutorial than normal and will cover some new Photoshop techniques, specifically using the pen tool, and more on layer blend modes. There’s also a video at the end of the tutorial to help illustrate the steps in more detail.
Today, a quick tour of one of the hidden gems of Photoshop – especially for building and structure mapping: The Grid.
This isn’t quite as formal as previous tutorials. After I created the tutorial for drawing water, I carried on and quickly coloured and shaded the flagstones. Here’s the video of that process, which fills in a lot of my standard working method – base colour and then a collection of overlay layers to add detailed light and shade.
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).
I’m going to take an existing battlemap and turn it into an underwater ruin. Here’s the map I’ll be using – a simple ruin from this Ruined Library map pack. Ruins work well as they can easily be the remains of a unfortunate city subjected to an Atlantean cataclysm. Continue reading “How to turn a map into an underwater landscape”
I’ve had a lot of requests for tutorials on drawing water recently so I’ll be covering some different techniques of indicating water on maps this week. Today I’m going to cover how to create a rippling water pattern in Photoshop using the clouds filter. This is a little technical, but it’ll become clear why we’re doing this over the next few days.
As light hits the waves on the surface of the sea it’s distorted and that creates a pattern of light and dark across the sea-bed that’s very distinctive. We can replicated this pattern in photoshop with relatively little trouble, but there will be some new concepts so I’ll take it step by step.
This isn’t strictly a tutorial, but rather a step by step for a recent city map. I’ve been doing some city design recently for Rhune: Dawn of Twilight, and got the okay from Jaye Sonia to post some work in progress shots.
Here’s a quick tutorial to get back into the swing of things for 2013. I was asked about drawing coastlines. This is just a technique question so it’s software agnostic.
1. Starting point
Lots of people are jumping into the #fridayfiveminutemap and posting phone snaps of their maps. A couple have asked how to take a picture of their map and clean it up a little. This mini tutorial should help with that. The basic idea also works for cleaning up scans, and the techniques are useful in a whole range of places (you can find a version of this geared to Gimp users here).
The dark and foreboding wood is a staple of fantasy literature and our own folklore. Continue reading “How To Draw Forests”
