This is less a tutorial, and more a note following last week’s post on drawing grasslands. The result of that tutorial strongly depend upon the background texture used and I wanted to highlight that with this post.
Category: Tips and Tricks
How to Draw Grassland
Grasslands are tricky to map. They’re large empty open expanses. But if you just flood fill an area with light green it’ll stand out like a sore thumb against your beautifully rendered mountains and lovingly painted rivers and forests. The colour is tough too – you want it to be a light green without being fluorescent.
I’ve found that the following works well for grasslands: Continue reading “How to Draw Grassland”
Lunchtime Tips: Blend Modes
Blend modes are a wonderful feature of Photoshop, and also appear in many other programs, including Gimp. Here’s a few I use regularly. I’ve taken the same styles o text and shown how they appear using the different blend modes. Further down, you can see the effect of using a selection of different gradients and setting them to the relevant blend mode. There’s a breakdown of each blend mode after the jump.
Continue reading “Lunchtime Tips: Blend Modes”
How to draw isometric cliffs
Following my quick run down of how to draw cliffs here’s an equally quick one for drawing cliffs on isometric maps.
How to draw cliffs – 3 different styles
So I was asked a while ago about different cliff mapping styles. Today I thought I’d break the hiatus of the last couple of weeks with a few different styles of cliffs. It’s not really a tutorial, just a breakdown of a couple of the styles I’ve used for different maps.
Continue reading “How to draw cliffs – 3 different styles”
How to draw isometric hand drawn mountains
Today’s tutorial is a quick walkthrough for isometric or forced perspective mountains. This is entirely software agnostic, and is the starting point for maps like this or this.
This sketch was drawn with a pen, but can equally be done in Gimp with a mouse, or Photoshop with a tablet. Continue reading “How to draw isometric hand drawn mountains”
How to colour quick trees for RPG maps
Today I’m walking through my method for colouring trees quickly for RPG maps. This follows on from this mini-tute/discussion on different tree styles from last week. I’m working with style 1 from that tutorial here, though it can be directly applied to the other styles just as easily.
The problem with trees is the leaves. Continue reading “How to colour quick trees for RPG maps”
How to make a grunge brush – Gimp
How to make a grungy brush – Photoshop
One incredibly useful tool in photoshop is a good dynamic grungy brush.
The human eye looks for detail and texture, or patterns and regularity. If you use a hard edged round brush in your work, there will be hard edged circles in your work. We’re very good at picking them out, so your audience will see them. On the other hand, if you use a brush with splattered edges, a random orientation and a variable size then there will be no pattern anywhere. Then the human eye sees other patterns and forms. It sees texture that isn’t there, and fills in regions with the texture it believes it should see. Continue reading “How to make a grungy brush – Photoshop”
More City Design Tips
I was asked the following question over on the Paizo boards:
Can I ask a question about city design?
I see advice I’ve seen elsewhere — start with the streets.
But — how? Continue reading “More City Design Tips”