Hand drawn city maps

[Gluhoded]

Hi,
These are some maps I've made years ago, found when I was cleaning the mess that is my old room in my parents' house.
What I wanna do to 'em now is to somehow color them digitally, but since I have no experience with PS whatsoever, I don't really know where to begin.

These are the first two drawings, hopefully I'll get to scan & upload some more later this week.

Any word of advice would be most welcome

IMG_0001zip.jpg

IMG_0009zip.jpg

[Ascension]

You have a lot of options for coloring but to boil things down there's coloring inside the lines and outside the lines. Outside is sort of like just grabbing a paint brush and slopping some color down, paying no heed to where the lines are...nice for painterly types. Inside is more technical, of course, but you have to do a lot more work to the image before you can get to the coloring part. Mainly, you'll need to remove the grays from the image to leave only crisp black lines. You can do that with threshold, contrast, or lots of hand drawing with black and white. This part is very time-consuming.

[Slylok]

Excellent maps! here is a great tutorial for preparing a hand drawn sketch in photoshop http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDq42...eature=related After that, it depends on what you have in mind for you map. Youtube is a great place to teach yourself how to use photoshop.

[mearrin69]

Great drawings. Ascension is correct. You're going to want to work on the line work to make sure you have good contrast and remove all of the "dirt" from your original drawings. Once done, put it on the top layer of your stack and make the blend mode Multiply. I did this same process for my Haibianr city map (link) and I'll make a suggestion from my experience with that one: make masks! Take a hard-edged brush (pencil) and color in water, land, buildings, trees, or other distinctive areas with it on separate layers. When you're done with that you can use those as selection tools/masks/whatever to keep your drawing clean. If you're planning on putting a bevel on the buildings then I suggest using shapes or square brushes or something to keep it crisp...I didn't do this on mine and it shows. Good luck with these. Done right I smell featured map.
M

[Gluhoded]

Found some more maps from that collection.

don't think i'll "digitalize" them though, I think I like them the way they are...

1) a rich trade port city, like Venice

2) a large airship port & citadel

3) a city built around a citadel guarding a mountain pass

4) a collection of 6 different cities, the last one I didn't get to finish

[Steel General]

Neat stuff here...

[Lukc]

OMG ... you hand shaded the streets! :O

Wow, that was a lot of work!

They look nice, too ... I wouldn't do too much with them, maybe just digitally label them or something.