How to Design a Town Map

Today a quick mini-tutorial. This isn’t a photoshop tutorial, nor is it a tutorial for a polished finished map. This is a step by step in my own town creation method when I’m creating the first sketch layout. The key here is to have the town layout make sense.

Continue reading “How to Design a Town Map”

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.

free city tile for fantasy city maps - sketch and ideas

Here’s some of the logic behind the design: Continue reading “City tile ideas”

Wayfinder #4 Map Tiles

Wayfinder 4 free fantasy magazine for Paizo's pathfinder settingWayfinder #4 is out – the latest iteration of the excellent free Paizo fanzine. You can grab your free copy here – and I recommend that you do, it’s 92 pages of great free content.

Now that it’s out I can show off some of the art I did for the magazine – the map tiles that appear on p85. Here they are in all their glory – free to use (for non-commercial purposes) for anyone who would like them. Let me know what you think, and whether an expanded set would be useful.

Click the thumbs below to see the large versions of the image and download them, or just right-click save as to download each one. Enjoy!