Taking a short (indeterminent) break from the Dreadstorm Campaign and indulging in hand-drawn map making fun. I’ve really been enjoying learning how to draw the classic style of land maps with tutoring from Mr. Blando’s book, How to Draw Fantasy Art & RPG Maps. This is the same book I mentioned in my prior post, Castle with “Moat Dragon”.

When I started the map I felt pretty silly and thought it would look pretty dumb, but was pleasantly surprised by the final outcome.

Map Sketch Process

Map Sketch Pic #1 – Establishing the continent shape and islands

Map Sketch Pic #2 – Penciling in some mountains.

Map Sketch Pic #3 – Mountain details

Map Sketch Pic #4 – Let there be hills to hug those mountains

Map Sketch Pic #5 – Adding in some rivers and coastline

Map Sketch Pic #6 – Forests

Map Sketch Pic #7 – Final-ish version

I wasn’t brave enough to try adding cities and lettering to this one. I felt this was a good place to stop. For a first effort, I thought it turned out kinda cool.

Things I learned

1. Mountains are hard
2. Leave room for more than just mountains
3. I drag my hand all of the page, making a smeary mess
4. I need to do a better job of erasing lines
5. Maybe trees in a forest don’t need to be quite so compressed together
6. I should probably try to plan the whole map out ahead of time. But who am I kidding. I’m not a planner. I like to do things organically and see where they end up!

Coloring Digitally

I downloaded GIMP, a free & open source image editor, so I can work on coloring maps, and probably the lettering. I’m still figuring out how to deprogram my brain from thinking in Photoshop terms and learn how things work there. My muscle memory is surprisingly strong from all my many past years of using Photoshop. I find my self doing keyboard and mouse shortcuts that don’t really work with GIMP. I can’t tell you how many times I hit CTRL+D to unselect and got a duplicate file instead.

I like the idea of being able to use layers. With pencil sketching, drawing something on top of something else, like trees over a river, that erased bit is gone for good. Not just masked out. Huh. I think working digitally has gotten me a bit lazy and spoiled.

The above images were in no way modified in GIMP or Photoshop.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.