Fantasy maps and mapmaking tutorials by Jonathan Roberts
I ran across this video from Random House the other day. It’s the best preview I’ve seen out there of the maps I illustrated of the world of Game of Thrones.
Also, everything should be narrated by this guy. He could make the opening of the humblest letter sound Epic.
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.
The Midgard iPad Atlas was released last year. I created the map (more on that later) and the compass art. Today I’ll cover the different sketches that started the process, and the iterations between those and the final piece.
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).
It’s been a little while since this blog went down for renovation – and that was in large part due to the work on the Lands of Ice and Fire. The map folio (12 maps, 72 square feet of Westeros and the lands to the East in all) is now out, and normal service will be resumed. It’s had a great response, with some lovely things being said about the folio on MTV Geek, io9, Westeros.org and Flavorwire. I also had the opportunity to write a short piece on the process of making the maps over on the Huffington Post and in the January edition of ImagineFX.
photo of the maps courtesy of the Huffington Post story
The dark and foreboding wood is a staple of fantasy literature and our own folklore. Continue reading “How To Draw Forests”
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.
