[Award Winner] Old School Blue in Illustrator

[Badger]

Don't forget to RATE the Thread!!!

Why not? An old school blue map in AI. I used Adobe Illustrator CS3 for this, and since this is really my first tutorial, and more for my own instruction, you will excuse the mess of it. Also, there is probably a much faster way of doing a lot of this, I'm still trying to get the hang of AI, so bear with me.

I wanted something simple. I started off with a 7 in x 7 in RGB document with 72 dpi. (turns out this was more than I really needed, but with illustrator, I like to start large and crop later on if I have too.) If you plan on Printing the map at some point, then you will want to make the document CMYK and whatever dpi is preferred to print with.

I put a new color swatch in for this, a light blue which mimics the old d&d maps (R 173, G 216, B 230) a nice light blue. That's (C 30.2%; M 3.14%; Y 6.67%; K 0%) and for s&g (H 240°, S 100%, V 40%)

All the blue maps have the ancient standard of ¼inch squares which usually equated to 10'. So to mimic this grid I created a new pattern which is fairly simple.

Make sure your grid is on and set to .25inch with only 1 sudivision. Set your grid snap and point snap on. Draw a bounding box of 1 square, then grab the line tool, set the point to .50 and draw a line down the left side of the box, and across the bottom of the box. Grab your selection tool ("V") and select the box and the two lines and drag it to your swatch box. Automatically saving it as a pattern fill. You can then delete the box and the lines.
blue1.jpgblue2.jpgblue3.jpg

Then grab the box tool and create a 7x7 box (or whatever size your map is) x and y centered on 3.5, select the fill, and select your newly created pattern. You should have a nice ¼" inch grid in pasty blue.
blue4.jpg

Then rename your layer GRID, create your other layers I always just pump out about 5 new layers and name them as I go... Lock this layer, and hide it, and start on a new layer named SYMBOLS.

Now for some fun stuff