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!
Tag: illustration
How to draw, shade, and colour a mountain range
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”
How to draw flagstones
This isn’t quite as formal as previous tutorials. After I created the tutorial for drawing water, I carried on and quickly coloured and shaded the flagstones. Here’s the video of that process, which fills in a lot of my standard working method – base colour and then a collection of overlay layers to add detailed light and shade.
Compass Design for the Midgard iPad App
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.
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.
How to draw cliffs – 3 different styles
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”
How to colour quick trees for RPG maps
Today I’m walking through my method for colouring trees quickly for RPG maps. This follows on from this mini-tute/discussion on different tree styles from last week. I’m working with style 1 from that tutorial here, though it can be directly applied to the other styles just as easily.
The problem with trees is the leaves. Continue reading “How to colour quick trees for RPG maps”