Fantasy maps and mapmaking tutorials by Jonathan Roberts
Cities and buildings come up a lot in questions. I’ll put together a software specific tutorial on buildings, but today I’m just going to go through my philosophy when illustrating a featured building like a castle or a temple. The process is the same, regardless of software. In this case – ballpoint pen on sketchbook paper.
Continue reading “Highlighting Featured Buildings – Shape, Detail and Contrast”
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”
