Map questions

[Sel93]

Hey

I love the style of this map and I would love to do something like this for my map two.

So my first question: How do I create these "lines" that go all the way through the map? I dont know how its called, but it makes the map look really professional.

Then I wanted to ask on if you know any tutorials that show how maps of this type are created (So old, ancient looking maps)?

Thanks in advance.

[Ascension]

Those lines are called rhumb lines. They are for navigation (sailing) so why they are on land is kind of nonsense...I guess they help break up the negative space. We have more info on rhumb lines elsewhere on the site so you can search here or on wikipedia. As to the map, it looks like various dry brushes or scatter brushes were used for the forests and grunge effects. The rest looks hand-drawn with some icons stamped down. Not sure how the mountains were done but I assume they're hand done. No tutorial exists that I know of for replicating this but it doesn't look too hard.

[Hai-Etlik]

Assuming the map is either large scale (I think Middle Earth is about Europe sized so it's probably a bit too big an area, but borderline) or in the Normal Mercator projection (Which preserves direction at all scales), the straight lines are rhumb lines (lines along which the bearing is constant) used for Dead Reckoning navigation as Ascension said. The curved lines on the other hand are completely meaningless decoration that show that the artist is certainly not a cartographer.

Check this thread for links to my Rhumb line generator script, and some pre-generated lines: http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...l=1#post154451