Fantasy maps and mapmaking tutorials by Jonathan Roberts
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”
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.
I’ve been working more on my hex mapping project. One of the requests was to have random terrain placement. So, rather than picking a terrain element, placing it, and then changing to a new one – instead pick a terrain type, and place a load of terrain with the tool taking care of variation. That took a bit of coding, and threw up a nasty bug. Every 7 or 8 times you clicked the base of the tile would place, but not the terrain on top. I tried everything to figure out why – the data was there, when you refreshed the map, the terrain turned up, but it wouldn’t load on click.
It turns out it’s an image load problem. Continue reading “Killing hex bugs – and the importance of sprite sheets”
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”
This is a quick one. After the Napa map (see below) I had some questions on how to draw mountains. This style is a little different to my previous maps, closer in style to a skiing map. I thought the easiest way to show the process was to create a short video walkthrough. Enjoy!
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.
