How to Draw Icons – and a Free Ship!

Free Ship Icon for Pirate Maps
Free Ship Icon

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.

Continue reading “How to Draw Icons – and a Free Ship!”

What lurks in the shipwrecks of the briny deep?

Ship's Graveyard Underwater Fantasy Battlemap Map PackToday sees the release of The Ship’s Graveyard map pack released in partnership with Kobold Quarterly. The pack details a huge underwater map (25 square feet when printed out full size) with walls of kelp, schools of fish and shipwrecked hulks. The perfect lair for a kraken or aboleth and their dark designs upon the world. When I used this map the players found themselves in the deep after their ship was destroyed by a kraken. At 6000px square (25 square feet when printed out at 1 square = 1 inch) there’s more than enough room for an epic battle against the horrors of the abyss.

Here’s a low res preview of the map in the pack: Continue reading “What lurks in the shipwrecks of the briny deep?”

The Wreck of the Goodwife

Underwater map of the Wreck of the Goodwife
The Wreck of the Goodwife

This was created as a personal piece and was then picked up by Open Design. It has since graced the back page of Kobold Quarterly #13 in glorious full colour and turned up in Sunken Empires – a sourcebook for underwater adventure. It can be purchased at full resolution – 100 pixels per grid – in the Kobold Quarterly store here.