This was an old sketch with ballpoint pen in the back of a pad of paper. Recently I pulled this into photoshop to do a little tidying up, and ended up adding a touch of colour and shade.
Tag: sketch
D&D Dungeon Maps from Game Night at Tor.com
One of the wonderful side effects of living in New York is the chance to run into great people from Tor.com. I’m now part of a semi-regular D&D game, and I draw the party dungeon maps.
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Busy-ness – and who would live in this tower?
So things got rather busy. More on that later, but for now a quick sketch this evening to blow off some steam. Who/what would you expect to find in here?
If, for whatever reason, that could be of use to you, feel free. It’s CC-BY-NC-SA licensed.
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.
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.
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Compass Design for the Midgard iPad App
The Midgard iPad Atlas was released last year. I created the map (more on that later) and the compass art. Today I’ll cover the different sketches that started the process, and the iterations between those and the final piece.
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.
Here’s some of the logic behind the design: Continue reading “City tile ideas”