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.
Tag: vtt
How To Draw Water On A Map
It can be tricky to draw water on a map. You don’t want to fill areas with a flat blue, but you also don’t want to draw every wave and ripple. The trick is to strike a balance, and provide a visual shorthand that quickly sells the presence of water. When putting this together I was thinking about Mike Schley‘s water style (shown in this map).
Bundles of maps
A couple of years ago I teamed up with Steve Russell to turn a couple of the maps that I created for the Rituals of Choice adventure path into map packs. The plan was to see whether people were interested in the maps themselves as a product separate to the adventures. The packs initially just included a multi-page pdf that allowed people to print them out at home and assemble them on the table, but quickly expanded to include high res jpgs, an A4 bundle alongside the US letter format packs, gridded and gridless versions of the maps and finally maptool campaign files for those of us who prefer to use virtual tabletops.
So did it work? With over 2200 map packs sold at the time of posting this I think I can say yes! Continue reading “Bundles of maps”
The Bandit’s Lair
Any self respecting bandit needs a lair. This month’s Fantastic Maps release, in partnership with Kobold Quarterly, presents a cavern lair that any Bandit prince would be proud of. The cave system was carved from the rock by the waterfall that still run through the middle, cascading between the two levels. Continue reading “The Bandit’s Lair”
New Map Pack – Necromancer’s Lair
It’s the first of the month, and that means a new Fantastic Maps map pack, in partnership with Kobold Quarterly! This month we go dark and dungeon-y with a Necromancer’s Lair. The map shows a large underground room with spiked pits, rubble, raised platforms, gargoyle statues and magic circles. Continue reading “New Map Pack – Necromancer’s Lair”
City tile ideas
After showing off the city map tiles for Wayfinder #4 (previous post) it got me thinking. The square format is repetitive and blocky. Also, the directional lighting means the tiles can’t be rotated for variety without it looking like there are 4 different suns. So, whilst they are pretty, they have their drawbacks when trying to create a large map. I also feel that creating a whole city at this level of detail is a bit of a fools errand. That’s a lot of tiles to build a district, let alone a full city.
So I’ve been playing around, and because this is a personal project rather than a commission, I can make my mulling public. So here’s what I’ve come up with so far.
Here’s some of the logic behind the design: Continue reading “City tile ideas”
Another New Map Pack – The Ruined Library
As with the last map pack, this one hails from the Coliseum Morpheuon project by Rite Publishing. In this case a library destroyed by meteors. Fun to create with the landscape torn and blasted under an aggressive sun:
Here’s a small preview of the full size map in the pack: Continue reading “Another New Map Pack – The Ruined Library”
New Map Pack: The Low River
It’s been a busy month, resulting in a new dungeon map for sale. It’s aimed at Dungeons and Dragons, or Pathfinder games, but can be used with any RPG.