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How to Draw Swamps
Here’s the breakdown of how I draw lineart for swamps. 1. Rivers Swamps are often around a river – if this is the case, then begin with the river at the heart of the swamp. Unlike most rivers which...
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How to use the pen tool to draw houses
Following the previous tutorial about town design here’s a tutorial on filling in the buildings in the town. I’m jumping in at the stage where we’ve already got the terrain, major locations and roads...
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Drawing Buildings with Dynamic Brushes
Earlier in the week I posted a tutorial on how to draw buildings with the pen tool. But sometimes drawing each building just takes too long. For whole cities, you probably want a quick way to lay in...
View ArticleDefining 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...
View ArticleDrawing Old-fashioned Coastal Waters
Really quick one today – this is an illustration of how to draw old fashioned coastal waters. Lots of historic maps use rippled lines to indicate the sea. Here’s a couple of quick pointers on...
View ArticleHighlighting Featured Buildings – Shape, Detail and Contrast
Cities and buildings come up a lot in questions. I’ll put together a software specific tutorial on buildings, but today I’m just going to go through my philosophy when illustrating a featured building...
View ArticleDungeon Hatching
There’s a lot of old-school gaming posts going round today, and I thought this one would fit in. This isn’t really a tutorial, more a set of thoughts on different ways to indicate walls on a line map....
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Quick Mountain Tutorial!
Today, a quick one on isometric pen and ink mountain ranges. 1. Draw in the ridgeline Draw in the ridgeline of the mountains. Add bumps and wiggles and allow the path to wander. 2. Add Slopes With the...
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Simple Labeling
Eric Quigley asked about labeling recently and that prompted me to think a little about how I actually go about labeling a map. Often it’s the last thing to get done, but it’s also the most important....
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Placing icons on a map in Gimp
Nikitas Thlimmenos was asking about how to place icons on a map, so here’s the walkthrough! The map is the Iconic Island (http://www.rpgnow.com/product/110804/Fantastic-Maps—Iconic-Island) as that’s...
View ArticleHow to Draw Mountains Take 2
This is a quick one. After the Napa map (see below) I had some questions on how to draw mountains. This style is a little different to my previous maps, closer in style to a skiing map. I thought the...
View ArticleHow to Draw Coastlines on a Fantasy Map
I’ve realised I have a particular workflow for drawing coastlines in my maps. Here’s a quick walkthrough. Each step is done on a new layer in photoshop, and I use a 5px hard round brush in each case...
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How to Draw Forested Hills on a Top Down Map
Often hills are indicated on a map by drawing an outline, but when you have forest on top, that outline gets obscured. So how do you draw forested hills? The trick is to use the detail of the forest to...
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How to draw, shade, and colour a mountain range
I’ve written up a couple of tutorials before on drawing isometric mountain ranges for fantasy maps – but never more than the pen and ink stage. I’ve had a few requests for how to take this to the next...
View ArticleHow to draw a horizontal mountain range
This is definitely the week of mountain ranges. I had a question on reddit on how to draw mountain ranges that go east-to-west rather than north to south. Here’s a very quick tutorial on the...
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After Earth – Mapping the Galaxy
It’s always fun to try something new, but in this case the something new was a sci fi galaxy map, and the client was Overbrook Entertainment, and Will Smith. The brief was to create 4 maps for the...
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How to draw a map
This tutorial covers my entire process for how to draw a map – from start to finish. In this case I’m illustrating a simple town map, but the steps apply to any map. Tools and Software I used Photoshop...
View ArticleHow to draw an isometric house
I’ve been asked a few times recently about how I draw isometric buildings. Here’s the run down. 1. Floorplan Use some rectangles to get an interesting floor plan. Don’t go crazy, but don’t just do a...
View ArticleHow to use Hatching to Show Elevation on a Map
None of my dungeons are flat. I always have things for people to jump off or fall into. But if you’re laying out a top down view it can be tricky to show elevation on a map. A simple method is to use...
View ArticleHow to Draw a Chasm on a Map
In a plan view map, elevation is hard. This is especially true for line art maps, where you don’t have the advantage of shading to indicate height and depth using the cast shadows. Here’s three...
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