Photoshop newbie keen to devlop map making skills for a better D&D game. Needs help!

[Hasvik]

Hi peeps,

First off - Sorry if this is the wrong place to post first this (i read the guidelines and this seemed most appropriate) I'm new to forums, I just stumbled across this site and it seemed perfect for the help I need.

I have two questions/calls for advice, If I may:

I am not an artistic person, never have been but yesterday I started using photoshop for the first time. I am hoping to make several maps to enrich my Dungeons and Dragons campaign. As I am sure many of you will remember - photoshop is daunting to the new comer! I have watched several youtube videos and managed to come up with this:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0e...ew?usp=sharing

(if your equally nerdy, you may recognize this as a simplified pathfinder map!)

I'm quite happy with it as I don't need at this stage to have the perfect map. I'm a start simple guy and work my way up. I do however have one question on this map. How do I make the waterways cooler? I have used brushes for most of the map. An easy way to get a nice effect but this makes all the parts I have done stick out like a saw thumb! Any ideas? That is deliberately a very open question as I am sure there are lots of things one could do but I am interested in learning as much as I can. SOmething to make it fit the rest of the map a little better or at least make it look a bit less like it was done by a child with a crayon.

The second question is a bigger one. I would like to do a city map. I have seen some gorgeous ones (many of which I have traced to this website) but I am really struggling for where to start. Here is are some examples of preferred styles:

https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/156007574572683554/
https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/156007574572683534/
https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/156007574572683483/

So... Where do you even start! I have seen plenty of youtube tutorials on making continent/country maps but very few on city maps (that aren't just black squares) I have been hunting for brushes of Birdseye view buildings but no real luck. Can anyone give me an indication of how to start or where to go for good tutorials on how to do this sort of thing? I don't mind long tutorials and putting the work in I just need some help getting started.

Also how are they doing that cool grass effect? I like the way its stylized but looks realistic enough.

Last thing - I'm really sorry but I'm not an artist, I'm not a cartopgrapher and I'm not that tech savy but I'm a fast learner. Can I ask that you keep any advice really simple and where possible without the technical terminology - otherwise I will be baffled!

Thank you for reading! I hope this is the start of a long lasting new hobby

Kind regards

J

[DrRhubarb]

Hey there. A lot of questions, many of which will be hard to answer since like you said they are a bit open ended. In regards to the rivers, it would be good to see your attempt to give you some guidance, but In general with that kind of map keep you blue color desaturated and muted. Make sure you draw your colors on a seperate layer and quite frankly you can use a normal round brush with or without a soft edge. You don't really need a special brush in this case. Once you have you blue water down in a seperate layer, trying playing with the different layer modes, like multiply, overlay, or colorize, to see what the effects are. Also try adjusting the opacity of the layer.

Regarding the city map, I can tell you from experience that there is really no cheat to making those buildings in the those samples. they are individually drawn. Now you can use a little time saving trick on the roofs, but drawing them as rectangular brown squares on a seperate layer and then applying a layer style bevel effect on them, which turns them all into a hip style roof. This technique is used a lot and you can tell that you have basically used a photoshop filter, but it could get you were you want to be quickly.

The other time saver you can do is hand draw a dozen buildings then duplicate and rotate them. Be careful not to copy and rotate ones that you have already rotated, because you will begin to lose line quality pretty quickly.

Hope this advice helps. Keep watching online tutorials to learn Photoshop. There is lots of great stuff out there.

[jfrazierjr]

The second question is a bigger one. I would like to do a city map. I have seen some gorgeous ones (many of which I have traced to this website) but I am really struggling for where to start. Here is are some examples of preferred styles:

https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/156007574572683554/
https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/156007574572683534/
https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/156007574572683483/

So... Where do you even start! I have seen plenty of youtube tutorials on making continent/country maps but very few on city maps (that aren't just black squares) I have been hunting for brushes of Birdseye view buildings but no real luck. Can anyone give me an indication of how to start or where to go for good tutorials on how to do this sort of thing? I don't mind long tutorials and putting the work in I just need some help getting started.

Also how are they doing that cool grass effect? I like the way its stylized but looks realistic enough.

J

The problem is that anyone who is NOT on pinterest will see large list of maps and NOT the singular map you are trying to point to. Go through this site to find specific examples. The last link is to Torstan and the first is to Mike Schley.

Torstan has several tutorials which will cover what I "think" you mean by "cool grass effect", so check out that section and look for his posts, though they are likely fairly old. Note that he originally used GIMP and then later moved to Photoshop, so some conversion will have to take place from tutorial to software depending upon software is being used at the time(GIMP and PS are similar in many ways, but different in a few)