Fantasy maps and mapmaking tutorials by Jonathan Roberts
In 2011 I was commissioned to create a map of the world of Ilkor for the browser game Ilkor: Dark Rising. The brief was to use a style inspired by the classic Middle Earth maps. Recently GAD Games have released a few of the detail views that I did for them so I get to show them off! I’ll have to wait a little for the full world map to be released, but for now, here’s the detail views: Continue reading “The World of Ilkor: Dark Rising”
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”
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.
It’s official! I am working on the maps for A Song of Ice and Fire by George RR Martin. The image above is an early mockup of the cover and the full map folio is due to come out in October of this year. Now obviously I can’t say too much about the project, but here’s the description from the product page:
George R. R. Martin’s beloved Song of Ice and Fire series, which started with A Game of Thrones, is bursting with a variety and richness of landscapes—from bitter tundra to arid wasteland and everything in between—that provide a sense of scale unrivaled in contemporary fantasy. Now this dazzling set of maps, featuring original artwork from illustrator and cartographer Jonathan Roberts, transforms Martin’s epic saga into a world as fully realized as the one around us. Continue reading “The Lands of Ice and Fire”
Following my quick run down of how to draw cliffs here’s an equally quick one for drawing cliffs on isometric maps.
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”
Right now everything in my RPGNow store is discounted for the GMs Day Sale! Check out the full range of map packs here, from windswept keeps to a lava filled dragon’s lair, from square rigged pirate galleons to a kraken infested shipwreck in the briny deep. Or pick up the critically acclaimed Breaking of Forstor Nagar for the bargain price of $6.99.
Sending hapless adventurers to an icy grave has never been so economical.
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”
Today Profantasy released my new fantasy city map style for Campaign Cartographer as their March Annual style. You can check out the full details here. The style contains 15 different house shapes, each with a range of colours and roofing, 12 different textures, and a bunch of miscellaneous extras from city walls and turrets to piers and trees.
I’m especially pleased with how the city walls and turrets came out. They can work as city walls, the walls on a compound, or even the structure in a full blown castle. Check out the full set, and the other example images.
A while ago I ran a gallery show of fantasy maps, and through that I met Christopher Merwin – a great guy and a local New York game designer. He was working on a fantasy world for the Pathfinder RPG called Sæmyyr, and asked me to work on up a fantasy world map. See below for the unlabeled map, and some details on how it was made.
