Creating a tutorial. Need your input.

[jshoer]

Great! Are you planning on discussing placement of features, or just the linework itself? Specifically, I'm thinking of the bit where you talk about making sure to incorporate river mouths, capes, etc into coastlines. It might be nice to see zoomed-in views of examples in your coastline and a sentence rationale for why they might be in one place as opposed to another. But, if that's expanding the scope of the tutorial more than you want, feel free to ignore me!

Also, why not include a little more detail on the mountains? It's not too much to embellish them with ridgelines and so forth, and it can be important in planning out how to lay out the lines to know how those features will appear. (I admit that having an idea in advance is less important in Photoshop than it typically is for me. )

[Wired]

Great! Are you planning on discussing placement of features, or just the linework itself? Specifically, I'm thinking of the bit where you talk about making sure to incorporate river mouths, capes, etc into coastlines. It might be nice to see zoomed-in views of examples in your coastline and a sentence rationale for why they might be in one place as opposed to another. But, if that's expanding the scope of the tutorial more than you want, feel free to ignore me!

No, it's a good point. A sentence or two describing to place river mouths ar locations where you've drawn a funnel-shaped coastline, or at least funnel-shaped coastline details won't hurt.

Also, why not include a little more detail on the mountains? It's not too much to embellish them with ridgelines and so forth, and it can be important in planning out how to lay out the lines to know how those features will appear. (I admit that having an idea in advance is less important in Photoshop than it typically is for me. )

The thing is, I'm trying to do a tutorial for beginners, and those "Jared Blando"-type mountains are the easiest approach I know of. Adding a larger variety of mountains with the necessary ridgeline features would look better, for sure, but will it make the process easier for beginners?

[Wired]

2a. Cliffs to Jump From!

Let's do a quick detour here. Any self-respecting nordic map with fjords needs cliffs, so we'll add these right away. Add a new layer and call it Cliffs.
Pick your 3px brush and start drawing jagged lines inside the "land" part of the map along the part of the coast where you want your cliffs to be.
Cliffs, Tutorial.jpg

Once you've done this, add a new layer called Cliffs, Lines and link the "points" of the line you just drew with the "points" of the coastline below, like this.
Cliffs, Lines, Tutorial.jpg

As with the mountains, remember the small parts that add life to your features. Add small, soft lines at each inner "edge" of your cliffs to suggest ravines where rainwater washes down into the sea.
Cliffs Tutorial Closeup1.jpg

Next step: Hills & Rivers, oh my!

[Wired]

Part 3: Hills & Rivers, oh my!

With our mountains in place it's time to start adding the "small mountains", meaning, in plain English, hills.
There are a few places where adding hills makes sense: at the feet of mountains (few mountains just stand there on their own, just popping out of flat terrain), at locations where you need a river to change its course, or simply when you need elevations but don't think the location warrants actual mountains. Ultimately it's up to you where you put them.

1.) Choose the hard round pressure size brush at 2px, create a layer called Hills and start drawing your hills. Use flatter, half-round shapes starting and ending in our nibbly lines, then add the same style of nibbly line to the center of the hill, leading towards its base in a diagonal line. Here's what I mean:
Hills Tutorial Closeup.jpg

If you want to give your hills - especially the larger ones - an extra dimension, add a few brush strokes in a half-circle along their base. This'll create the illusion of threedimensionality.
Hills Tutorial.jpg

2.) Rivers. Or creeks. Or streams. Whatever floats your boat. Or doesn't.^^
Since we're doing a comparable small-scale map it'll be necessary to add the type of rivers we usually do not add: the really small ones, the streams that you'd be having trouble not getting stuck with a rowing boat. But basics first: create a new layer and call it Rivers. Change your brush size to 5px, and do not apply too much pressure. This'll only work its magic if you apply the most pressure shortly before the rivers flows into the sea.
By slowly building the pressure you get a river that naturally grows in size!

Note: Rivers or, in general, rounded forms, are best drawn from the wrist, and not from your fingers. This gives you greater stability and reach. But take a look at the image:
Rivers Closeup.jpg

As for the whole map, going by these easy guidlines gives us this:
Rivers Tutorial.jpg

3.) Swamps. Swamps are like the mosquito-infested gift that keeps on giving: a space looks too empty? Swamp. Need to make some way impossible to traverse: Swamp. Make your mother in law vanish? SWAAAAAMP!
Okay, it's a pseudo-Scandinavian map, so there's going to be some swampy area in which all the water from the ice melting during the spring and summer months clogs up some swath of land.
Create a new layer and name it - you guessed it - Swamps. Stick to our trusty 2px brush and draw short, diagonal lines in the general area you want the swamp to be. Vary the pressure.
Swamp Tutorial Closeup 1.jpg

Now you've got the basic brush strokes in place you need some watery ways to signal that this is actually a swamp. So, new layer: Swamp Waterways. Drag this layer below the Swamp layer! Now do the same thing you did with the rivers, but on a smaller scale.
Swamp Tutorial Closeup 2.jpg

For a finishing touch go and add some grass tufts on a new layer called Swamp, Grass. All you need to do for that is draw two to three short brush strokes to get a bushel of grass.
Swamp Tutorial Closeup 3.jpg

Which leaves us with our map looking like this:
Tutorial Map.jpg

Next Time: Part 4: Forests! Also a Good Place for your Mother-in-Law!

[jshoer]

If you want to give your hills - especially the larger ones - an extra dimension, add a few brush strokes in a half-circle along their base. This'll create the illusion of threedimensionality.
Hills Tutorial.jpg

Can you expand the "few brush strokes in a half-circle" statement a little? I think you mean to do something similar to what you did with the mountains, but this phrasing could also suggest drawing a semicircle at ground level beneath the hill - and I don't think that's what you wanted, is it? You didn't do that on any of your example hills.

The river suggestions are good; do you think it would also be helpful to describe some common river geometries? Dendritic drainage basins, braided streams, or deltas? The details can get quite advanced, but many of our comments to beginners are related to river shapes.

Part 4: Forests! Also a Good Place for your Mother-in-Law!

Oh, come on, tell us how you really feel!

[Wired]

Can you expand the "few brush strokes in a half-circle" statement a little? I think you mean to do something similar to what you did with the mountains, but this phrasing could also suggest drawing a semicircle at ground level beneath the hill - and I don't think that's what you wanted, is it? You didn't do that on any of your example hills.

The river suggestions are good; do you think it would also be helpful to describe some common river geometries? Dendritic drainage basins, braided streams, or deltas? The details can get quite advanced, but many of our comments to beginners are related to river shapes.

I'll see what I can do.

[Wired]

Okay, here's the next part:

Part 4: Forests! Also a Good Place for your Mother-in-Law!

And we're back at map-making, this time with forests. Since this is the high north we'll be looking at coniferous forests only for this one. Deep, dark forests. The perfect places for encounters, dungeons, and places to hide the bodies...
So here's what you need to do, or rather, know first: where do you want to place your forests? This is true with every geographic feature, of course, and I've come to rely on a simple system that allows me to broadly settle where what needs to be. That is, I add a new layer and simply block it in with a large, fuzzy brush in a bright color:

Feature Placement.jpg

With that in place we move on to the actual creation of the forests. Using the color blocked spots as a guide we add a new layer named Forest Outline, pick our trusty 2px hard round pressure size brush and start drawing an outline. For the bottom and the sides we'll use a very slightly wavering line, just enough to give the eye a hint of the irregularity of a forest's edge. From time to time we'll intersperse the edge with a set of closely packed, jagged vertical strokes. Coniferous trees tend to end in somewhat edgy cones, unlike the broad crowns of deciduous trees. It's important to note that with the style we're employing realism really isn't needed. What's important is the general form and what the human eye associates with it. Take a look at this small section here and you'll see that, close up, it's really nothing like any sort of actual trees. Use short vertical strokes, and add small 'open triangles' in between them (otherwise the final product will look somewhat sterile).

Coniferous Forests How To.jpg

Don't freak out when what you draw has nothing in common with actual trees or forests. Trying to rectify that is a fundamental error made by many novice cartographers. Perspective is everything. Trying to draw completely realistic trees at the ground level of the map, so to speak, means a massive ton of additional work for literally no gain: zoomed out to the correct size of the map almost nothing of your painstaking work will actually matter. Reserve that level and love of detail for maps that concentrate on local points of interest, like a single forest.

If you take only one thing away from these tutorials, let it be this one: keep in mind when you do your own maps that distance and perspective are king.

Something that looks like utter crap from the close-up drawing perspective in your work process can and will end up loking really good in the finished product in its intended place at the right perspective. So, if you work on a map: zoom out once in a while! Get a feeling for the whole of the map and don't lose yourselves in the details.

Applying the simple technique shown above, if you hide the layer we used to block in the general location of the forests you'll get an outline like this:

Forest Outline.jpg

Again, we add a new layer, this one called Forest Features, and add the jagged brush strokes to fill the spaces we've outlined.

On to the last hurdle of the 'let's draw forests'-part: hills. We can do this on the same layer, by the way. A usual approach to hills in forested areas is to simply draw the forests around them. That way you get distinct forests and easily recognizeable hills.
However, for our tutorial I've chosen a different approach (and, in truth, it's a first time for me as well): we'll use the forest outline to emphasize the shape of the hills. To that end we'll simply apply the same jagged brush strokes we used to draw the 'trees' of the forest and cluster them along the shape of the hills. For effect, add a few brush strokes along the sides of the hills as well, just so it becomes clear they are actually covered by the forest.

Forest Hills.jpg

And that's it! You've drawn your first coniferous forests! Congratulations. Your map should now look something like this:

Tutorial Map After Finished Forests.jpg

Next: Part 5: Grass, Contour Lines, and Locations.

[ChickPea]

This is really helpful, Wired. Your forests look great.

Keep 'em coming!

[Josiah VE]

Absolutely loving this tutorial. Looks awesome.

[Ilanthar]

Interesting tutorial Wired, quite inspirational!