New to Fantasy Cartography

[FaultyAlgorithm]

Hello hello all,

I've played D&D/Pathfinder some years back and have always wanted to get back into it in some aspect. I do enjoy drawing when I'm not being a student, yet I'm quite the novice at it.
I stumbled on the Cartographers Guild while searching for cartography techniques for some coding venture that I am working on. Extremely random and I am glad that I found this forum.

I hope to learn how to draw some decent maps and get back into the D&D life.

FA

[ChickPea]

Hi FA, and welcome to the Guild. Glad you found us!

Are you hand-drawing or creating your maps digitally? There are quite a number of tutorials aimed at creating digital maps from scratch. There are tips for hand-drawers too, though they are a little more scattered, though you might enjoy this tutorial from Wired. Feel free to start a thread once you get going and share your work with us. If you need help with anything, just holler!

[FaultyAlgorithm]

Hey ChickPea,

Thanks for the nice welcome ^_^

I typically hand draw if I can get creative enough, but I really want to try to digitally create my maps. I might try to draw first then scan and edit later.
I've seen some resources around here and I followed some on YouTube. I got some results, but I am still having difficulty with coloring and using the different layer blend modes.

FA

[ChickPea]

If you're comfortable drawing by hand, it's well worth starting out that way and scanning your sketch into PS/Gimp (or whatever app you're using) and developing it from there. As for layers/colour blends etc, so much of it is practice and experience. Torstan has a fantastic thread with tons of tips that's well worth a browse, but take a look specifically at this post. Maybe it'll help. (It's written for Photoshop but would probably apply to any app with layer blends).