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.
Tag: fantasy map
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).
How to turn a map into an underwater landscape
I’m going to take an existing battlemap and turn it into an underwater ruin. Here’s the map I’ll be using – a simple ruin from this Ruined Library map pack. Ruins work well as they can easily be the remains of a unfortunate city subjected to an Atlantean cataclysm. Continue reading “How to turn a map into an underwater landscape”
Using clouds to create ripples
I’ve had a lot of requests for tutorials on drawing water recently so I’ll be covering some different techniques of indicating water on maps this week. Today I’m going to cover how to create a rippling water pattern in Photoshop using the clouds filter. This is a little technical, but it’ll become clear why we’re doing this over the next few days.
As light hits the waves on the surface of the sea it’s distorted and that creates a pattern of light and dark across the sea-bed that’s very distinctive. We can replicated this pattern in photoshop with relatively little trouble, but there will be some new concepts so I’ll take it step by step.
City Design Walkthrough
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 World of Ilkor: Dark Rising
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”
How to Draw Grassland
Grasslands are tricky to map. They’re large empty open expanses. But if you just flood fill an area with light green it’ll stand out like a sore thumb against your beautifully rendered mountains and lovingly painted rivers and forests. The colour is tough too – you want it to be a light green without being fluorescent.
I’ve found that the following works well for grasslands: Continue reading “How to Draw Grassland”
How to draw isometric cliffs
Following my quick run down of how to draw cliffs here’s an equally quick one for drawing cliffs on isometric maps.
How to draw cliffs – 3 different styles
So I was asked a while ago about different cliff mapping styles. Today I thought I’d break the hiatus of the last couple of weeks with a few different styles of cliffs. It’s not really a tutorial, just a breakdown of a couple of the styles I’ve used for different maps.
Continue reading “How to draw cliffs – 3 different styles”
City Mapping Made Easy
Today Profantasy released my new fantasy city map style for Campaign Cartographer as their March Annual style. You can check out the full details here. The style contains 15 different house shapes, each with a range of colours and roofing, 12 different textures, and a bunch of miscellaneous extras from city walls and turrets to piers and trees.
I’m especially pleased with how the city walls and turrets came out. They can work as city walls, the walls on a compound, or even the structure in a full blown castle. Check out the full set, and the other example images.