Newbie looking for cartography suggestions

[Islandman]

Hello everyone. I'm a newbie in a sense. For a long time, I've hand drawn maps for fun. I am now retired and looking to make a fantasy island nation map, including where I can drill down to provinces, cities, etc.... all the way down to streets and highways where I can name them. Does anyone have any suggestions or recommendations for software tools for this? I hope I am explaining this correctly. Thanks in advance for your help!

[Kellerica]

Hi there!

It depends a bit on what kind of a digital map you have in mind. You said you used to draw maps traditionally - would you be looking to continue drawing things by hand, but with digital tools? If so, your best bet would probably to first invest in a graphics tablet and some form of art software.

For tablets, Wacom are good but on the more expensive side. I've heard a lot of really good things about Huion products lately, and they are definitely more affordable. If I needed to replace my current Wacom Cintiq, Huion is probably where I would turn to right now.

For art software, there is of course Photoshop, but honestly, if you don't already have a good working knowledge of it, I'm not sure I'd really recommend anyone start learning it now. Adobe's pricing model is so ridiculous these days that anyone who can avoid them, should. Photoshop is amazing, don't get me wrong, but at this point I almost wish I hadn't spent so many years learning all its ins and outs. I'm so familiar with it that switching to anything else feels like a monumental task, but I hate paying for it as much as I do each month. But at the same time, Photoshop is an insanely powerful mapping tool, and there is a wide range to what you can do with. It definitely can have a steep-ish learning curve, or at least for me it did.

Affinity Photo is a much more affordable software that is similar to Photoshop, and while I've personally kept putting off learning it for years, it's supposed to be really good.

Clip Studio Paint is another software that I personally use, one is much more focused on art and drawing. It has a very powerful brush engine, and I've migrated to doing a large part of my linework with CSP before moving the file over to Photoshop. Definitely one to look at, if doing artwork by hand is what you are wanting to do.

Krita is, as far as I know, an excellent program for drawing as well, and it is completely free. It might be a good place to start, since you can just grab it for free and give it a go.

Now, if you are not really looking to do your drawings by hand anymore, there are also a number of programs specifically designed for map making that allow you to place premade assets and create your maps that way. The ones I can name off the top of my head are Campaign Cartographer 3, Wonderdraft and Other World Mapper. There might be others out there, I'm afraid I'm not that familiar with this kind of software, but those three are at least all ones I've heard a lot of good things about.

So yeah, as I said, the best option largely depends on what kind of maps you're looking to create! But maybe these give you at least a little something to think about. Happy to try and answer any further questions, if you have any.

[CassMerry]

Not sure if I understood what you mean but when you say you want to drill down from a large scale to street level, if you mean you'd like a massive project that lets you have all that scale in one map I know some version of Rebelle have a nanopixel feature where you can draw at one scale, then export it at a much larger scale, and it interprets it to avoid pixellation so you could then illustrate in more detail. If that was your question and I'm not misunderstanding, that might be a solution? It's not the cheapest option but there may be other software that can do the same thing.