Today, a quick one on isometric pen and ink mountain ranges. Continue reading
Quick Mountain Tutorial!
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Category Archives: Tips and Tricks
Worldbuilding By Map
This article was originally written for Fictorians.com and was pitched at people building their own worlds for novel writing, but the general process should be useful for a broad variety of world builders.
Let’s get one thing out of the way right now.
A map shouldn’t be pretty.
Dungeon Hatching
There’s a lot of old-school gaming posts going round today, and I thought this one would fit in. This isn’t really a tutorial, more a set of thoughts on different ways to indicate walls on a line map. Continue reading
Highlighting Featured Buildings – Shape, Detail and Contrast
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.
Drawing Old-fashioned Coastal Waters
Really quick one today – this is an illustration of how to draw old fashioned coastal waters. Lots of historic maps use rippled lines to indicate the sea. Here’s a couple of quick pointers on reproducing the effect.
1. Add your first ripple
First, draw the coastline in a nice dark brush – or press relatively heavily with your pen (this was a ballpoint on sketchbook paper). Then, pressing more lightly to get a fainter line, draw a parallel line to the coast. Where your coastline is ragged and fractal, this line should be smooth and flowing. Follow the edge, but smooth off the sharper edges. Try to keep the same distance from the coast as you draw.
2. Add in the rest
Now repeat this with successive lines. Each time you add another line, increase the spacing slightly. Also, smooth off the sharper corners of the line inside. If you have an inlet (like I’ve got here), don’t cram the lines in to get through – smooth over the inlet, and draw another set of disconnected ripples within.
This looks good with a light blue wash around the coastal edge, so this doesn’t have to be just a black and white map technique.
Defining Scale using Mountains
I’ve been asked a lot about how to depict different scales recently. The question is – how do you tell the viewer of one map that they’re looking at a zoomed in region of a small area, and on another map convince the viewer that they’re looking at a large area, zoomed out. The easiest cue for the viewer is mountain ranges. These are the feature that’s different enough at different scales that they can act as a defacto scale-bar.
Drawing Buildings with Dynamic Brushes
Earlier in the week I posted a tutorial on how to draw buildings with the pen tool. But sometimes drawing each building just takes too long. For whole cities, you probably want a quick way to lay in whole blocks of buildings. Photoshop can help – using dynamic brushes. Continue reading
How to use the pen tool to draw houses
Following the previous tutorial about town design here’s a tutorial on filling in the buildings in the town.
I’m jumping in at the stage where we’ve already got the terrain, major locations and roads mapped out. The next step is filling all the remaining space with buildings to turn a skeleton of a town into a town. The key here is to give the impression of a large number of buildings, without having to agonise over every single chimney pot and awning. Continue reading
How to Draw Swamps
Here’s the breakdown of how I draw lineart for swamps. Continue reading
Tutorial Suggestions
I’m putting together a list of future tutorials – and I’m looking for suggestions. What topic would you like to see covered?