Fantasy maps and mapmaking tutorials by Jonathan Roberts
All the maps posted in blog posts.
At the start of the month I released the Iconic Island – a map pack with an island map and a load of individual map icons indicating things like castles, cities and ruins. Today I’m covering how to create your own icons. This is a slightly longer tutorial than normal and will cover some new Photoshop techniques, specifically using the pen tool, and more on layer blend modes. There’s also a video at the end of the tutorial to help illustrate the steps in more detail.
So a pretty hefty snow-dump just landed on NE and I’m inside looking out the window at a very white NYC. We were out last night and a friend was talking about his upcoming travels, to much warmer climes. So today I thought I’d buck the trend of all the snow pictures, and post a map set in the savannah:
A while ago I was commissioned to illustrate a three story ruined keep, with a dungeon beneath, for Mongoose Publishing. This was in my pre-Photoshop days (2009). It makes me wince a bit to see the messiness of the linework in these, but they served their purpose for the job at hand, and looking at old work is a good way to gauge progress.
Images © Mongoose Publishing, reproduced with permission
Islands have a special place in our collective imagination. Islands are the other, they contain treasures hidden from society, mad hermits and castaways, and desperate mariners relieved to find fresh food and water.
This is an old commission, created in Gimp for a Call of Cthulhu adventure. Why is it that Cthulhu adventures always seem to take place on isolated islands?
This is very desaturated compared to my more recent work, and I doubt I’d ever use that font again but it’s interesting seeing how a lot of the other features of the map remain very recognisable.
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.
The dark and foreboding wood is a staple of fantasy literature and our own folklore. Continue reading “How To Draw Forests”
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”
It’s official! I am working on the maps for A Song of Ice and Fire by George RR Martin. The image above is an early mockup of the cover and the full map folio is due to come out in October of this year. Now obviously I can’t say too much about the project, but here’s the description from the product page:
George R. R. Martin’s beloved Song of Ice and Fire series, which started with A Game of Thrones, is bursting with a variety and richness of landscapes—from bitter tundra to arid wasteland and everything in between—that provide a sense of scale unrivaled in contemporary fantasy. Now this dazzling set of maps, featuring original artwork from illustrator and cartographer Jonathan Roberts, transforms Martin’s epic saga into a world as fully realized as the one around us. Continue reading “The Lands of Ice and Fire”
