help with map

[josh-hill]

hi, im new here so firstly hello and secondly i apolagise if this is the wrong section or there is a tutorial ive missed, but i would like to make some realy nice hand drawn maps. ive made a few nice ones wich i am proud of but some things realy bother me. how do people do large forests / woods? as these are causing me the most trouble. the other thing is how do you show high/ low land? obviously rivers will give a vauge idea but i usuraly use contor lines if anything wich look messy and ruin the look. finaly what do you include in your maps? im currently working on the eastern edges of my empire and so far have done the mounrains, major rivers and will do the forests soon. thanks in advance, josh

[Redrobes]

Reckon there will be a better person to answer this than lil o me. But I wanted to ask. Are you using a sharp stick with the ole wet n dirty stuff or a digital tablet ?

There was a tutorial by Delgondantelius which was fab and all about using inks and so on for mapping and specifically covered trees. So you can do an advanced search on that if I dont beat you to it and edit that link in.

Edit -- http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=3013

[josh-hill]

thanks for the link, that looks verry helpfull. yeah im using pencil and paper with some pen to outline some things.

[NeonKnight]

When i did my old Pen-Paper maps, I never really did anything more than just a scalloped-squiggly line colored green inside to represent a forest.

[Karro]

I've done it both ways on an all B&W handdrawn map:

I've done "individual" trees (basically triangles and circles with lines out their bottoms) and I've done the large scalloped squiggly line (shadded in with more squiggelies) and lines coming out the bottom of it, too. I started using the second when I wanted a half-decent map, but didn't want to take the time to draw hundreds of circles and triangles on sticks. But, truth-be-told, I always preferred the circles and triangles on sticks.

[josh-hill]

cheers guys. i have tried couloting green but ive decided i want to try and keep in black and white, it ruins the tone abit. +you cant rubb out grren 'say aragorn whats this green smudge?' 'oh well i drew this map myself and thats where i thought mirkwood was,m yeah im a bit off but didnt want to redraw it'. and im not too good at draawing individural trees, i cant do them well enough so ive settled for a squiggle with lines coming out of teh bottom and with lines on the insidfe hinting at a canpoy. here is problem number 2 though, because one side was against the shaded side of a mountain i had to define the outline with darker pen and that looked strange so i did all of the outlines in pen. so now it has a realy bold outline and a light interior, guess its hard to imagine without a picture so ill try and get one up soon. but would you say it is a good idea to shade the wooded areas? thanks