Quick Tips and Tricks as a Start

[JJCymbolic]

Hello, my name is J.J.C, and I am obviously new to this site.

I am an author, as I assume most of you are. My books involve five different worlds, with many different nations. I've decided that I want to start drawing out all the nations. I've never done anything like this before and plan to learn a lot. I will review many threads and posts. For now though, it would be great if I could get a run down on tips and tricks of drawing a map. Something quick and simple that comes off the top of your head, something to start my foundation on.

[J.Edward]

Hey JJC - welcome to the Guild
I've made many maps for fictional worlds as well as the real one.
Some things I've learned...
Start big and work inward. Get all of your continents worked up properly first before getting into regional and local details.
Define your main land shapes first - the look and feel of the continents.
Sometimes it helps if you define were some major mountain ranges are as that may affect the land shape.
After land shapes would be the mountains and major terrain features.
Those will determine where seas and rivers would go.
Next obviously is seas and rivers. Then you can get into more regional and local specifics.

And of course, doing a wip [work-in-progress] thread is great as people can offer suggestions and advice as you go.
Many people will have thoughts and ideas that you may not have thought about.
We have people on here with much knowledge and experience in a wide area of subjects.

Anyway, great to have you at the Guild JJC.
Cheers,
John

[Josiah VE]

Welcome to the Guild J.J.C! There are many authors or at least enjoy writing on here.

I'm not an expert like J.Edward, he said some very good stuff.

Remember rivers always start somewhere high like mountains and flow down in the path of least resistance. Basically a rule of thumb to rivers is they never split, and they never go from one side of a continent to the other (of course for fantasy anything is possible). Small rivers will join on it's path to make a bigger river and it always flows to the sea.

Like J.Edward said, it would be good to post a WIP thread in here

And also check out the tutorials section.. Plenty of good tutorials there. This is a good tutorial if you want to do and isometric map. Also Quest Atlas and Fantastic Maps is where I started for mapping.

I generally begin with coastline, then draw the mountains, then you can add rivers flowing down from the mountain, then work from there. For town placement I use common sense, where would be a good food source? Beside a river, on the coastline, in a fertile plain, very often beside a body of water.

Hope that helps!

[tilt]

welcome to the guild - we're a diverse bunch in here and lots of authors, hobby or pros, in here as well