A map of Danelaw Britain

I can never predict my next client – something that came very true when I was approached by Inkshares to create a map for Gary Whitta’s debut novel Abomination. Now Gary has an interesting background: writer for Star Wars, Book of Eli, and – of course – After Earth, for which I did the expanded universe maps. Though we both have 1 degree of Will Smith, it turned out that it was pure chance that Inkshares came to me for a map of Danelaw Britain.

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How to draw a horizontal mountain range

This is definitely the week of mountain ranges. I had a question on reddit on how to draw mountain ranges that go east-to-west rather than north to south. Here’s a very quick tutorial on the difference. If you want to go deeper into the north-south version, check out this earlier tutorial on mountain ranges.

The hotizontal version is very similar – with a few tweaks. Continue reading “How to draw a horizontal mountain range”

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 Forested Hills on a Top Down Map

Often hills are indicated on a map by drawing an outline, but when you have forest on top, that outline gets obscured. So how do you draw forested hills? The trick is to use the detail of the forest to indicate the hills, rather than obscure them.

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Some Sketches and Screenshots from a Work in Progress

A web based fantasy hex mapper
Fantastic Mapper – current status

If you’ve been following along on Google+ you’ve likely seen some notes on a hex mapping project in the works. This hex mapper started as a challenge to myself over the summer when I took a holiday back to visit my parents on Skye:

Can I code a hex mapper web app during a holiday?

Continue reading “Some Sketches and Screenshots from a Work in Progress”

Mapping Napa Vineyards

Tricycle Wine Partners final map of Obsidian Ridge and Poseidon Vineyards

Not all my maps are  of fantasy lands – every now and again, one comes along from the real world. Before Christmas I was asked to map the Mayacamas mountain range for Tricycle Wine Partners, a vineyard in California.

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Simple Labeling

How to label a map
Eric Quigley asked about labeling recently and that prompted me to think a little about how I actually go about labeling a map. Often it’s the last thing to get done, but it’s also the most important. A map without labels is just a pretty picture, it’s not useful. So, it’s worth taking some care getting labels right.

This is a photoshop tutorial, but these techniques are almost identical in Gimp.

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