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.
Tag: city
Of Turnovers and Cities
It’s good to hand over final pieces. This one went out the door today – a city map for a client. The combination of detailed line art featured locations and more anonymous shadowed buildings seems to work well.
The featured locations were all drawn at many times their final size. You lose the precise detail when the locations are shrunk down, but the combination of the details provide a sense of the structure.
New Map Pack – The Iconic Town
Drawing Buildings with Dynamic Brushes
Earlier in the week I posted a tutorial on how to draw buildings with the pen tool. But sometimes drawing each building just takes too long. For whole cities, you probably want a quick way to lay in whole blocks of buildings. Photoshop can help – using dynamic brushes. Continue reading “Drawing Buildings with Dynamic Brushes”
How to use the pen tool to draw houses
Following the previous tutorial about town design here’s a tutorial on filling in the buildings in the town.
I’m jumping in at the stage where we’ve already got the terrain, major locations and roads mapped out. The next step is filling all the remaining space with buildings to turn a skeleton of a town into a town. The key here is to give the impression of a large number of buildings, without having to agonise over every single chimney pot and awning. Continue reading “How to use the pen tool to draw houses”
City Design Walkthrough
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.
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”
The Amphitheatre
Through December I’m releasing the remaining map packs from the Breaking of Forstor Nagar.
Today it’s the turn of the Amphitheatre. This stands as a testament to better days in the city, when people would come to watch performances, or stroll amongst the statues. But now that the city lies besieged and ruined it acts as the scene for a desperate encounter where the PCs must make difficult choices that will determine the future of a number of hapless souls. Continue reading “The Amphitheatre”
Free city and archipelago maps
So it seems it slipped my mind to post these maps up. They were created for Wayfinder #3 (a long time ago) and are free for people to download for their own use. I tend to stick to battlemap scale maps for my fantasy map packs as I feel those are the most useful. If you’d like to see maps like this as map packs – let me know in the comments.
First up – an archipelago:
Second – we have a small city (well, really a large town):
These are free for personal use. Feel free to download and share around under the CC-BY-NC-SA license. Who know, a series of islands and a fortified town on the water might be just what you need for the pirates in your Skull and Shackles game!
The Old Stross Bathhouse
Streets of Zobeck has been unleashed upon the world by Open Design this week. It’s an adventure anthology of 7 Pathfinder adventures for levels 1-10 set in the city of Zobeck in the Midgard world. But that’s not all, it details drop in locations and stand alone NPCs as well as feats, traits, spells and gear for your gritty inner city gutter rat. The majority of the maps are by Gill Pearce, but I got to work on one of the lairs of villainy – the Old Stross Bathhouse:
