Inspired by the form of Practice Doodle 2 I wanted to colour it in, rather than leave it black and white. But, a standard coating would not do. I wanted to create the look and feel of a moonlit landscape at night, which is why the map has a very strong blue tone. The star like shapes represent various cities and are supposed to give the impression of a night sky. I opted to not name the different mountains, rivers and cities, as this isn’t really supposed to be a functional map.
Hope you enjoy:
So, I haven’t posted in a while, and it might have seemed like I had given up. But, that is not the case. Sometimes, life just happens and gets in the way. I am, however, trying to get back into it, and while I will not have finished maps as regularly as when I started off, I will post a few more work in progress pictures.
Anyways, the last map i posted was a crappy phone picture of a practice doodle I did while travelling. Therefore, let me present to you, properly scanned versions of these same practice doodles:
However, I am not just posting to show you old stuff. There was also a third practice doodle i did that I hadn’t posted about yet. So, I am taking the opportunity to present it directly in scan quality.
For the third doodle I tried a different technique for the forests again, and I really like this one. It is, however, rather time consuming to draw all the little tree trunks. I also tried something a little different to highlight the coastlines. I like this method of drawing tiny waves. They do, however, make the coastlines look crowded, especially as there are a lot of tiny islands in this map.
Additionally to the scans you can see in the post I have added three scans to the gallery, which are of high enough quality to be printed on an A4 sheet. As the maps contain no labelling and no city placement whatsoever you can happily print and use them in your games.
Here’s another practice doodle. It is very much in the same style as the first one, but I tried another way of drawing the mountains and the forests. Due to the shape of the coastline, I even have a name for the map: Crescent Moon Bay. I know very imaginative.
The mountains are larger, which allowed me to add a few more detail lines. For the forests I opted to thicken the bottom outlines, similarly to the coastlines. I do like this a lot, as it really adds to the tilted perspective of the map. This time around I did not add any shading, as I did not think the map needed it. As a little addendum, the compass rose is still not ideal, but I think it is a lot better than my previous one.
Usually I try to post my new maps once a week on Friday. There’s no specific reason for it being on Friday, I simply wanted to have one fixed day per week to work towards. The idea was that one fixed day per week would provide me with the necessary motivation to always make time to draw something. Even if I can’t always get an entire map done by Friday I should hopefully have at least a work in progress picture to share with you.
As I am currently on holiday and away from my usual workstation, keeping up with that schedule, however, is rather difficult. Nonetheless, I did not want to leave you ‘mapless’ during my holidays. As such, the next few maps will be simple, hand drawn, black and white ones. The images themselves will also be of poorer quality, unfortunately, as they are simple photos I took with my phone. Once I am back home, these maps will also be scanned in and proper versions will be added to the gallery.
But for now, here’s today’s map:
The map doesn’t have a name as I was mostly using it to practice a few different techniques. Firstly I drew the mountains differently. In this map I drew them individually, whereas previously I drew them as one long ridge line. I don’t have a particular preference. Both methods work equally well.
Secondly, to address the issue of the perspective shift I had in my Stormlands map, I gave the forests more details and shading closer to the bottom, as in a tilted perspective the bottom of the forests would be closer to me than the top of the forests. Similarly, I thickened the bottom parts of the coastlines. Overall this should provide the map with a more coherent tilted perspective, and I am quite happy with the result.
Please ignore the compass rose, because that one is just horrible. However, one step at a time.
Today’s post is an even shorter one, as I will just show you the finished version of the city map from the last post. The close-up of the temple on the left is gone and has been replaced with a map legend and some additional lore about the city. If you want to read the text check out the full resolution picture in the Gallery. Be aware though, that the text still contains the occasional mistake, as I didn’t get around to proofreading it. The legend as a whole was a bit of a rush job, and could be improved significantly, but this’ll have to do.
Now, all I have to do is wait, and see how well I do. I won’t get first place, since there are quite few maps which look a lot better than mine, but competitions are always a great way to improve.
Today is going to be a shorter post, as the map I’m going to show you is not done yet. So what you are seeing below is still very much a work in progress!
I started working on this a few weeks ago as part of a competition which is running throughout the month of July. The top left corner has the map of a Dwarven city, which houses a temple of the God of Artisanry in the center. The upper left corner shows a close up of the temple, and also depicts the source of the eternal flame within the temple. The bottom part of the map was reserved for the legend and a few lore tidbits.
As you can see, there is still a lot to do, and very little time to do it. The competition ends at the end of the month, and I will be away on holiday for the last week of July. Therefore, I will cut the close-up on the left and focus on the city, and hope to get it done over the weekend. Once it is finished you will get a new post and I’ll add a higher resolution version to the gallery.
It is a friendly competition which takes place on the Cartographer’s Guild, an awesome map making community and a great resource if you feel like drawing your own maps.
To take part, all you had to do was go to this website, generate a list of 10 random locations and pick one location from that list to draw. Below you can see the list I got.
There are a few interesting options, but I opted for the first one. I already had some ideas about a Dwarven city, and after Stormcliff, I wanted to draw a larger city anyway. Drawing the entire city, however, was quite the task I set for myself, which is why I won’t be able to finish my original plan in time and have to cut some stuff out. Maybe I’ll finish the map like I initially envisioned it at a later stage.
Some housekeeping first. I added a gallery page to the menu bar on the top, where I’ll post all of my finished maps in a higher resolution version than you can find them in the individual posts. These versions are still not of high-enough quality to print, but they’ll look good on your screen. That’s it for the housekeeping, so let’s move on to today’s map.
I seem to be moving down in scale slightly. After doing a continental map, a regional map, and two town maps I tried mapping the inside of a building. Namely the first floor of an inn or tavern. To spice the map up and give it a more 3-dimensional feel I used an isometric perspective, rather than a simple top down perspective.
And here’s the finished version of the first floor:
This is still very much a work in progress, as I intend to also add a second level, potentially even a third level, and to top it off a nice background and border texture. These additional features, however, are currently on hold, as I’ll be working on something else in the mean time. I will definitely get back to it though.
To get the perspective consistently right, I used the following grid as a background to draw on:
With the grid, getting the perspective right was quite easy, and shifted the focus to getting the scale of the different objects right.
As usual, I start with the outlines first before working on the colours. You have seen that aspect in all my previous posts, so this time I’ll focus a bit on the colouring, because I never get the colours right the first time around. The initial colouring of the tavern looked like this:
My initial goal when starting off with the colours is to create contrast between the different objects, especially with so many being made out of wood in this case. After that, it is mostly about adjusting the saturation and lightness of the colours to get the desired look. This can often lead to hours of tweaking around with the values to get them to a point you like. What I found particularly annoying about this initial version was how the floor looked. The floor is supposed to be a backdrop and, therefore, should not pop out as much as it does here. I had to adjust it quite a bit until I got it to a point I was happy with.
Littlebrook is another small town from my D&D setting. The town itself hasn’t been relevant for the game as of yet, and it might never be so. However, it did give me the perfect opportunity to practice and learn. Specifically, I wanted to draw the map following this fantastic tutorial by Jonathan Roberts. The tutorial is written for Photoshop, but most of the aspects are easily translatable to GIMP.
And here’s the final product:
As you can see Littlebrook lies within a very hilly region with the occasional little forest between the hills. I like the way the hills and the forests turned out. I am, however, not too happy about the river. I, probably, should have snaked it more between the hills, rather than keeping it this straight. While I am never completely happy with any of my maps, I do very much like the overall look and colours of this one. nice side benefit of this style is that it draws decent town maps relatively quickly, as it was far less time-consuming than my Stormcliff map.
Whereas my previous maps have all been initially drawn on paper, and then edited digitally, Littlebrook was drawn digitally from the get-go. The line work is still hand drawn though, as I made use of a Wacom Intuos tablet.
Following now are a few pictures of the first steps, as I would usually draw them on paper, but digitally this time. There’s hardly any difference.
I know, my handwriting is horrible, but luckily that is not going to stay in the picture. Nothing is set in stone at this point, and can easily change in the next steps.
After the sketch it is time to refine the outlines of the various shapes. You can see that some things moved around. There are more hills than on the initial sketch, and the tress are placed slightly differently. The town is already pretty much done at this point, as I wasn’t planning on adding any more detail than the simple black shapes. The roads have disappeared, but they will be added back in at a later stage.
The detail lines will further enhance the outlines drawn previously, and give shape to everything. While previously all you had were random black lines, now the lines start to look like what they are supposed to look like. Usually I keep all the outlines I draw. In this case, however, I removed the outlines I had drawn for the hills and only relied on the detail lines. That is because the outlines I had drawn were too separated. Only using the detail lines makes it look like the hills are naturally flowing into each other.
This is usually the stage, at which point I would stop drawing on paper and scan the map to finish it digitally. When I draw on paper, I draw everything, including the detail lines by pencil first. Then I draw over the lines I want to keep with a black pen, and erase the pencil marks. There will always be a few marks and smudges left after erasing the pencil lines, but these can be edited out after scanning it in. In any way, both methods lead to very similar results, as you can see by comparing this to the scans from my previous posts.
I will definitely do more digital only drawings in the future. However, I don’t think I will completely switch to digital only, because it just does not feel the same as drawing on paper.
Every D&D campaign needs a hub-city or town where the party can rest and gather their strength in-between adventures. After doing the continental and regional maps it was time to draw the map of Stormcliff, the party’s safe haven.
Above is a first sketch of Stormcliff. As the name suggests the town rests upon a cliff. Outside of town in the bay, there are three separate rock formations jutting out of the water, rising to the same height as the cliffs. These islands are connected to the rest of the town via a number of bridges.
Overall the sketch helped me get a good idea of the layout of the town, and was of great help whenever the party asked for directions. However, it was never meant to be the final version as there are quite a few aspects which I don’t like at all. For instance, while I wanted a hand drawn feel for the map the buildings just look horrible. Furthermore, to avoid empty space outside the town I pampered the area with farmland, and not in a particularly pretty way. Last, but not least, the town looks bigger than I wanted it to. Stormcliff is not meant to be a large city. It was supposed to be a smaller town, which would not overwhelm the players, but still offer them a few interesting opportunities for exploration.
As such, I set out to redraw the map. I opted to start from scratch and not simply change the look of the buildings from the sketch as I also wanted to draw the coastlines differently.
As you can see, I opened the bay up quite a bit, so I could increase the size of the islands. I also increased the size of the houses, so that there are fewer of them, thus reducing the perceived size of the town. Additionally, rather than having the outside plastered with farmlands, I opted to add additional features to provide a little more variety. For instance, there are now houses outside the city walls close to the gates not linked to any farmland, and there is a hill next to the town on the left. Moreover, the occasional tree dots the landscape.
As with my previous maps the line work is done by hand on a piece of paper, which is then scanned in. The colouring, shading and labels are added digitally, which resuled in the final map depicted below.
The shading further reinforces the impression that the sea-level is actually quite a bit lower than the town. The colours help with contrasting different parts of the town. For instance, to the right of the river there are more gray stone buildings in Stormcliff, indicating that the people living here are probably better off, than those living on the left side of the river.
To conclude, I vastly prefer the new version of Stormcliff. Even without the colouring I think it looks a lot better. For one of my future maps I plan on drawing a larger city as well. I do not know, however, when I will get around to it, as drawing city maps can be very time-consuming.
After having done the continental map from my previous post it was time to zoom in a little and map out the starting region for the party. The good thing about having done the continental map first, was that the outline for the individual region was already there. All I had to do was zoom in.
However, the coastlines which looked good from far away, don’t hold up in this zoomed in perspective. Therefore, I printed the zoomed-in version, and used it as a guideline to redo the coastlines and fill in the details of the landscape.
The outline of the Stormlands hasn’t changed much, but the coastlines look a lot more natural now. I then went on to add and detail additional features of the map, such as the mountains, the forests, and the rivers. As the world is a fantasy setting and magic exists, I also wanted to add a fantastical feature to the map. That feature takes on the form of a floating forest, which can be seen on the left hand side, close to the coastline. The floating forest consists of islands of earth that have risen out of the ground and hover in mid-air. Right now, it is difficult to pick out the islands as floating in the air, but that was something I was hoping to remedy later when adding shading.
With the new line work completed it was time to scan the image in and do the rest digitally, using GIMP. And here’s the final product:
Overall I am quite happy with how the map turned out. The shading of the Floating Forest helps provide the impression that these are islands hovering in mid-air. Obviously the name right next to the feature helps as well. As I haven’t mapped out the neighbouring regions to the Stormlands yet, I covered those areas up with clouds focussing the view on the Stormlands alone.
If you are looking at the map and think there’s something funny about it, you would be right. The problem with the map is that different features are drawn in different perspectives. The forests are clearly drawn from a top-down view, whereas the mountains are drawn from a more tilted perspective. This conflict gives the map this funny feeling and is definitely something I have to work on in the future.
Tilby's Topography 