Stormholt Progress & Method
Hi y'all, first time posting, so on and so forth. Posting from mobile, so let's see how this goes.
I figured I'd share how a Luddite like me makes maps in this day and age of fancy software and such. Hand drawn FTW.
(EDITORS NOTE: all the images didn't attach the first time around, because, why not. Now as I'm uploading again, they're all rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise, because I can't win. I'll attempt to fix as technology allows.)
CONTENTS
1. OUTLINE AND BASIC LAYOUT
1.1 OUTLINE OF LANDMASS
1.2 REALISTIC COASTLINES
1.3 TERRAIN FEATURES
1.3a MOUNTAINS
1.3b RIVERS
1.3c FORESTS
1.3d OTHER FEATURES
2. DETAILS
2.1 MOUNTAINS
2.2 HILLS
2.3 RIVERS
2.4 HUMANITY
2.4a SETTLEMENTS
2.4b ROADS
2.5 ILLUMINATION
3. INKING
3.1 GENERAL INKING NOTES
3.2 HUMAN SETTLEMENTS
3.3 RIVERS
3.4 MOUNTAINS
3.5 HILLS
3.6 FORESTS
3.7 SHORELINES
4. FINAL DETAILS & MONSTERS
5. COLORS
1. OUTLINE AND BASIC LAYOUT
1.1 OUTLINE OF LANDMASS
I start with a general outline of landmasses. There are many ways to do this (rice, getting drunk and scrawling on a sheet of paper, etc.), but push comes to shove you need a general shape or two for things to happen.
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1.2 REALISTIC COASTLINES
Real life doesn't have such broad curves though, so you gotta go in and wriggle 'em up a bit. I'll probably end up saying this a lot, but don't worry about sticking exactly to your lines. This is a small example,
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...and this is the same principle applied to the larger map.
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Because I'm a masochist, and because I think they're pretty, I'll add some fjords to the northern bit of the continent. *spoilerspoilerspoiler* I'm still working on marrying the fjords with the inking technique I've picked up.
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Notice I haven't really erased the original coastline from where the fjords cut in. This is fine, so long as you keep your head on straight during inking. If not, eh. Work around it. You're a smart cookie.
1.3 TERRAIN FEATURES
Now we start putting some geography on this pile of scribbles. Depending on your level of skill and/or the style of map you're going for, you might not add much more detail than this (you should this is really podunk) but all we need for now is some vague suggestion of where we want mountains to go. I start with mountains because they're going to be some of the most obvious causes of other geography.
1.3a MOUNTAINS
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Couple of things to keep in mind when doing mountains:
1) they're the result of tectonic plates smooshing together, so the ridge line should extend for quite a while (even out to sea in some cases).
2) mountains come in ranges, which means a whole bunch of them sandwiched together. You don't see a single line of mountains very often. The Lonely Mountain got its name because it was weird and different, not because it's a common occurrence.
3) mountains come with foothills. You don't see a lot of them here yet, but they'll show up soon.
3a) mountains are easier to draw than hills. F$@& hills. It took me forever to learn how to draw them in a way that didn't look like a giant shat al over my map.
All right so now it's time to do some serious geography. I'm a bit of a stickler for realism (sometimes) and I like my maps to make sense, so I try to give them a general place on a globe, and its prevailing winds. Wikipedia is a great resource for that, but you can also use just this image.
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This map (and most of my maps because it's not a white boy pastime without a healthy dose of unconscious Eurocentric bias) takes place roughly in the norther hemisphere. Winds bring moisture, and with them rivers and vegetation. Mountains block winds and strip them of all their neato moisture.
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I'm not actually sure how well the distances would work out in real life, but for the purposes of this map, the big upwell winds that cause the Sahara in our world happen about halfway up the lower landmass and sweep south into those mountains, and the converging northern winds meet about halfway up the larger landmass.
1.3b RIVERS
Rivers can really go anywhere, but it's usually good to put them where they make sense (windward side of the mountain). At our focus height we don't need to put a lot of detail into how the rivers move exactly, just their general course and some bendy bits to make things look pretty. For those of you who want a little more realism, rivers will make many sharp/small turns in or near mountains, and wide swooping ones out in the plains.
1.3c FORESTS
Forests go where the water goes, so again, windward face of mountains. They'll also start showing up around rivers once the water has moved a bit. I mean, heck, they can go anywhere you want, really. Other good places are where the prevailing winds meet (in our world that's Central Europe and wouldn't you know we get the Black Forest there) so don't be afraid to just slap a forest down if you're feeling sassy.
(Editor's Note: I'm writing this late at night, my commentary might get a little more entertaining as this goes on. I'll try to keep it PG).
1.3d OTHER FEATURES
You'll also notice some markings down near the bottom of the map that will pretty much go unchanged from here on out. That's a swamp. I haven't found a way to draw a swamp that looks like my mountains do, so I'm stealing old-school cartographical symbology. Any of you folks know something, gimme a holler.
Another level of detail you can use to add some zazz to your maps are incidental islands loitering around your coastlines. Those are great for pirates and shipping and all that nonsense. Throw a few on, but don't overdo it.
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Here we get some islands in the channel between the two landmasses, and we also round out the fjords. Fjords are basically mountains that decided to take a bath in frigid glacial waters because they're crazy Norwegian types without a lick of common sense, so they have a bunch of incidental islands that are great for giving yourself carpal tunnel if you have a hankering. Ow. No wonder Slartibartfast got an award.
2. DETAILING
All right, now it's time to add some detail. We'll zoom in a bit so I can show you the process, but I won't waste your time showing blow-by-blow.
2.1 MOUNTAINS
Close up, we can see how potato these mountains look. Ugh, such potato. We're gonna turn them from this:
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...into this:
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Wow! Way less potato! Take that, dirty commie Russia!
Okay, okay, but how do we actually do that? First, you erase your potato and draw in a ridge line, like this:
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Make it as long or as short as you want, but you generally want like 4 solid peaks or so. Slope it back down to your "ground level", then draw in the...skirts? Where the mountain hits the ground.
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Keep in mind that mountains are three dimensional piles of rocks, so you'll need to throw in some courtesy slopes going down the opposite side (or at least as far as you can see past the next peak). Add some ridges for texture, and boom, you have a mountain range.
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Let's see what that looks like when applied across the whole map.
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WOAH! Instantly less potato.
Another thing to keep in mind with mountains is that generally the tallest peak is in the center of the range, flanked by a bunch of smaller chump mountains that couldn't make the football team. Heh. Nerds. It's not imperative that you put it there, but that's where it's probably gonna be.
2.2 HILLS
Now we have hills. Hills are the mountains' dorky little cousins always trying to be like their cool cousin. You might get hills without mountains, but you will never have mountains without hills.
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The way I've been doing hills, they all tend to end up looking the same after shading, but whatever. Just like mountains, draw a ridge line (lower and rounder because obviously) and some small slopes down to the ground. These slope lines won't likely be more than hash marks. I don't draw a clear base for my hills, as it a) gives them a look like they're more easily rising out of the ground and b) they look like turds if I do.
All right, let's see what that looks like on a macro scale.
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Looking less potato by the second.
2.3 RIVERS
Another thing we can do is give our poor rivers some depth because come on guys, they're just squiggles. I feel like I'm stealing someone's technique here, so sing out if you know who I'm tipping off. Just go about halfway up the length of the river line and draw a parallel line branching off and following the main line all the way to the coast. Like this:
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Neato burrito.
2.4 HUMANITY
Okay, now it's time to put in those pesky humans. We could add more detail to the forests, but I consider that to be fine detail work, so that'll come later.
2.4a SETTLEMENTS
People settle on water. End of story. If they don't, life is miserable, and there better be a good goddamn reason they do (oil). So, put a city at your river mouths, river junctions, and lakes. Anything not on a visible source of water is NOT going to be a big city, and might not be big enough to make it to a country sized map. Life sucks in the sticks.
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You'll see that I've made some indication to the size and importance of my settlements. The big hexagon is the capital, followed in importance by the pentagons, squares, and triangles in that order. Try to keep your cities few and your towns many. At least one or two more than the next level of development up.
2.4b ROADS
All right, so we have these mud lickers, how do they get around? Roads. Highways for connecting big cities (hexagons and pentagons), roads and trails for towns (squares and triangles).
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I use a dot-dash for highways and dots for trails, but you use whatever works for you and reads well. All right, let's see that on big size.
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Nice! Looks like I went ahead and named 'em all, too. Oh, and would you look at that, I added some detail to the forests. Little pointy comes for coniferous forests, little rounded bumps for deciduous. Don't know anything for jungles, yet... Hm. Anyway, on to more detail work.
This next step is pretty optional, and only if you want to add a real personal flair to your map. Let me repeat: YOU DO NOT NEED TO DO THIS FOR YOUR MAP TO LOOK GOOD.
I decided to screw around with illuminating the names of my cities and towns. Give it that nice fantasy map feel. How you do it is up to you, but this is what I did.
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It's fairly big because it's the capital. Rich people get bigger letters. It's helpful to use guidelines so you know how big your letters will be, and it's also smart to figure out which letter is in the center of the settlements name so everything balances out well. Let's see what it looks like with less big letters.
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Nice! Slightly smaller, but you can still see the style. Now we go one bigger and see all of them all prettied up.
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The smallest towns don't get the fancy curvature the other cities did. Suck it, poor people. I guess. Now, to the next major step (salutesmajorstep) INKING!
3. INKING
3.1 GENERAL INKING NOTES
This is where you should start being careful with your lines. While you can usually recover from a mistake at any point in the process, here's where it gets much harder.
I've taken to inking the most prominent/artificial elements of my maps first, so I can avoid them properly with the lines for the less important things. In most cases, that means names and cities get inked first.
3.2 HUMAN SETTLEMENTS
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That looks pretty snazzy, if I'm allowed to toot my own horn. I decided to go with a more representative image to show off the capitol (ooh! Flags! Gotta remember that next time!) than a simple hexagon, but don't think you need to do the same. Dots are perfectly serviceable, and take up less space. Identifying major cities is still important, though, so it would behoove you to find some way to do that. Now, let's apply the same principle onto the rest of the map.
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And look at that, some roads got inked up too. To emphasize the highways, I did them with a 0.3 pen, and the roads/trails were done with 0.1.
3.3 RIVERS
All right, the next thing I want my map to show cleanly is the rivers. These were done with 0.1 to prevent covering up the wiggles.
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3.4 MOUNTAINS
And we have some mountains, too. These bad boys are done in 0.5 to give them the big, solid look.
I only let the ridgelines directly parallel to the horizon meet at the summit, letting others get close without ever meeting. This not only lets the eye more easily distinguish peaks (less of an issue with color, but nice to do), but also helps give them their snow caps.
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I shade the mountains with the 0.3 pen. In general, I shade with a pen size smaller than I do the object. I also don't completely fill in the shape, as I want the viewer to easily see what is what if something is heavily shadowed.
Shading is a pain in the rear, but I just stick to a hard horizontal light source and hash accordingly. It helps me to angle the paper a bit and imagine drawing down away from the light source, almost like it's dripping from the object.
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3.5 HILLS
Hills go the same way, and usually end up getting their underline anyway. *shakes fist*
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With hills, I usually add a small bit of shadow trailing off "behind" the hill, which I think gives it a nice three-dimensionality. I don't do that with mountains because they're already hella dark.
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Now that's my kind of sexy.
3.6 FORESTS
Let's move on to forests. The same general principle applies: draw the shape, drip shadows away. I used my 0.1 pen for these.
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These are a little easier in my experience, and you only really need to shade where the trunks would be to get that cool texture. Now is as good a time as any to draw in some scattered tree tops to clue a canny observer in to the climate. Points for conifers, bumps for deciduous.
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These treetops get shaded as well, but they're so small that even with a 0.1 pen (I didn't have my 0.05) even hash marks can be too much. Exercise caution. Let's see what that looks like for all the forests.
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Looking good. I've also inked the swamp indicators because im running out of detail soon and it's time to do the shorelines.
3.7 SHORELINES
For my shorelines I do a double thick line with my 0.7 pen. That gives me a nice, bold line that really pops and draws the viewer in for the rest of the detail. Those fjords I talked about earlier have come back to haunt us, though, because they lose a lot of their definition and intricacy with this kind of inking. As I said, I'm still working on it.
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F&$@ fjords. Ow.
I think it still looks pretty good, but I'll definitely be experimenting with something lighter in the future.
Well, that's the fjords. Let's do the rest of the coastline.
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4. FINAL DETAILS &a MONSTERS
For good measure, I've also broken up the white space with some grass hashmarks, and drawn in some sand/dune indicators in the desert region. Per a previous request, I've also thrown in a sea monster.
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Because who doesn't love a tasty halfling snack now and again?
The final inking step is to lay down coastal waves. I use a 0.5 for ocean waves and a 0.3 for lakes.
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And just like that, inking is done!
5. COLORING
After all that, coloring is fairly simple. Keep the snow caps white , and if you have an arctic region, fade out the color you use for plains so it blends well.
FINAL
Now, without further ado, here's the final map. I hope you enjoyed this entry, and thanks for letting me ramble on about how much I've stolen from other people!
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Originally Posted by Diamond
Fabulous work LGW.
Fun and cute 
