The Continent of Gravos finished commission

[Tiana]

A commission I recently finished of a continent and island with a magical volcano and the spreading effects of its strange magic.

I take commissions, you can see my fantasy map portfolio for more.

The final map:
Gravos for Azureos-low res watermarked.jpg

A couple of detail zooms on parts I particularly like.

teeny lighthouse.jpgvolcano closeup.jpg

Later my client plans to have me do a 'the world was half torn apart by the spreading magic' version so I'm looking forward to that one!

[Diamond]

Nice one. I particularly like the way you did the forest edges south of Uikitrene, and the look of the deserts. I'm assuming you weren't responsible for the way the rivers branch?

[Tiana]

Nice one. I particularly like the way you did the forest edges south of Uikitrene, and the look of the deserts. I'm assuming you weren't responsible for the way the rivers branch?

Indeed. My client gave me a sketch. This was for someone's established campaign setting that was using his sketch for quite a while, so to me it's more important to capture it accurately to the original sketch for the nostalgic value than to try convince them their rivers are wrong. I mean... it has a blue and pink volcano so I'm assuming high geological accuracy isn't a major consideration...

That said, this client took note of me commenting on appreciating when people let me design their rivers and even asked me after this one was done, "What's a watershed?" so I have high hopes for the next time I work with him having improved rivers.

And thank you! I spent...... way too long on the desert and forests. Probably just as long as the volcano. T_T

[Ralgo]

hello , i am new to the cartography art , and i would like to ask if you only used photoshop for this masterpiece !!

[Tiana]

hello , i am new to the cartography art , and i would like to ask if you only used photoshop for this masterpiece !!

Thank you. I didn't use Photoshop for any of this artwork, actually. I used Other World Mapper, Affinity Designer and Clip Studio Paint! However, you could achieve a similar result by painting in Photoshop, I just like Clip Studio Paint's handling of the stabilizer tool and the way the paint brushes and smudge tools can be set up better than Photoshop's equivalent, and Affinity Designer better than Illustrator.

Let me break down what I did for you.

First, I used Other World Mapper to set up a vector base for the land shape and river / lake shapes. I like to use this program because it lets me keep these elements as vectors to be edited later. I export them as a multi-layer PNG so that I can clip my paintings to them or paint underneath them, in the case of the coastline.

The underlying color for the water and basic land texture is made with a bunch of different textures sandwiched with various blend modes and then merged.

The 'coastline' effect is a combination of a custom wave brush I made and a bit of hand painting with an airbrush. The foam closest to the edge is the custom wave brush, and that I duplicated and set one of the layers to a darker color and offset it a little bit. The spreading fade is done by airbrushing and then using a 'finger painting' smudge brush in Clip Studio Paint. This is one of the things you can't do in Photoshop because the smudge tools work very differently. In CSP my brush for this is just set to drag the paint without adding new color to it, not 'blur' the paint. This lets me make the swirly effect you see as the water fades. You see this well around Ioforia.

Now we move on to the land.

The desert is a combination of the finger smudge shading (that's the dark ridges) and then 2 major texture layers, one of which has the big cracks and one has the little cracks. This all goes over top one other layer that's done with a very simple brush that you could duplicate in Photoshop, a hard round that's set to about 50% opacity and pressure sensitive for opacity.

That kind of brush is used for most of the land base painting, for the mountains and tundra as well. Then the mountains got a few more layers, including one where I used a smudge brush to add streaks of snow and one where I used a stock photo of a mountain and painted the actual mountain texture on an overlay layer using a clone paint brush, and one where I used a scattering brush to add broken up little clumps of snow. This took a very long time. The volcano got a few more layers where I painted on glow, screen layers to give it that iridescent color you can see, some with a hard brush with the opacity set to about 50% and some with an airbrush set to 100% opacity but pressure sensitive for opacity.

The forests are done with a few different brushes but they all have in common that they scatter dots around. One is a tube full of about 30 different trees with a 'watercolor edge' to automatically give it some shadow, one is like that but with a bushy shaped ribbon instead, you can really see the effect of using the bushy one with a 'watercolor edge' near Lagoria. Then there's a couple that are just dots that get scattered like an airbrush, with different degrees of severity. One of them has just sharp opaque pixel rounds, one has larger fuzzier dot clumps, one of them has leaf shapes that scatter. I vary that and the color in order to get the variegation of the forest. The same technique is used in the field, only I did a couple of passes where I also added some lines to suggest fields and hills with an airbrush.

The cities and windmills are broken up into a couple of different layers, but they all have one thing in common: a black stroke on the layer style. This lets me avoid inking and then coloring, I just draw straight in with the color. I drew the bases of the buildings on one layer using a brick and stone ribbon brush, and then I used the layer above it to do the windows and trim. Then I put one more layer with a glow layer style underneath the cities and added a bit of glow behind them, which I smeared around with the finger painting brush I mentioned before, and then a layer above it with a glowing style that was partly opaque to give a bit of lighting/shadow on the cities. And then I did one more layer set to multiply where I added a bit of shadow around the base of the cities, and yet another layer above that where I painted in a bit of forest/foliage to cover the edges of the city icons. I used the same concept, a layer with a stroke on it, to add a few spots of rocks around the edges of the lakes and whatnot, those aren't part of the underlying coastline.

At some point I also merged all of the layers together and did a little bit of manual blending with the some other blenders, but not too much because I aim to have some visible edges to my paint strokes, to make it look painted instead of completely digitally rendered.

I also went around and added lighthouses on the city layers and then a glow/dodge layer to do the lighthouse beams, and added whales and boats in the ocean. The boats are made from 2 base boats with a few variations in flag/color/visibility of the lines, as well as skewing them a bit. The cities/windmills/docks/lighthouses are all drawn in as unique elements for their positioning, but I cheated a little with the boats. I don't think the average viewer would notice that it's actually just 2 boats with variations.

The final finishing touch was some mist and fog layers where I used an airbrush to do the fog around the top of the mountains and smoke from the cities.

Let's make no mistake, to get this style you just have to spend ages building things up with many layers on different blend styles, using a variety of brushes. You'll end up with dozens of layers if not a hundred, and it will take a long time. Don't ink it first, a rough sketch will do to hold your concept. Just make the base shape of the continent as something you can use as a clipping mask. Paint the colors in as big color blocks to start, and then start rendering those blocks into more detailed components by putting layers over top of them. Like the mountain did not start as a mountain OUTLINE, but instead a big triangular shape of solid grey with a shadow on one side.

To get this result use digital painting and concept art techniques, focusing on setting up blocks of color first and then rendering in depth of contrast and color variation. I used a good 10 different shapes and styles of brushes, and only the one with a bunch of tiny trees in it was a "map making" brush I made, the rest were all paintly style brushes, with the foliage ones being the middle ground. More than half of them I made myself, to match the feel of my own hand.

Some people would reach this result by painting entirely in black and white and then coloring over top of that, but I work in color from the start and everything after that is just painting over, building depth, adding contrast, adding detail, spending 8 hours on a single mountain... this is not my fastest style by far.

Finally, I mentioned I used Affinity Designer. That's where the finishing vector components come in: the text, the icons, the label. CSP and OWM are both quite limited in their text controls and I prefer the results of using a vector program for the text pass. The icons come from a font which lets me position them right in the label. A common mistake I see in new cartographer's work is not having the icon lined up with the text, it really should be either at the beginning or the end of your text label for maximum clarity, and putting in the icon with a font, using two fonts in the text box, will allow you to line it up perfectly and have the same layer style as the rest of the text. I've been doing it this way lately because I really like the consistency of having the town / city / fort type markers matching my text style.

While this map didn't end up with a legend, the different markers on the labels are indicating from my client's sketch, two different species with the colors and the different faction cities with the markers.

I use the free program Birdfont to make my own fonts, you can make any vector shape and load it up in there to save things as a font, but you can also find many great free for commercial use fonts on Dafont with symbols that work perfectly for cartography markers. In this map, I used a symbol font for the markers for the cities. Just be sure to look at the license before you download them because some are only free for personal use. Of course Windows comes with the Wingdings fonts, that's a good start, but here are some others that will work well for the same kind of purpose.

Here's some examples of fonts that you might use for map decor and markers!

This is the one I used for the markers on this map: https://www.dafont.com/haus-ethnik-dingbats.font

And here's a bunch of others that are 100% free for whatever use:
https://www.dafont.com/mayan-glyphs.font
https://www.dafont.com/history-icons.font
https://www.dafont.com/ikatan.font
https://www.dafont.com/chinese-zodiac-tfb.font
https://www.dafont.com/damgram.font
https://www.dafont.com/garlic-salt-extras.font
https://www.dafont.com/laurus-nobilis.font
https://www.dafont.com/cornpop.font
https://www.dafont.com/vintage-frames.font
https://www.dafont.com/calligraphic-frames-soft.font
https://www.dafont.com/deco-mix.font
https://www.dafont.com/celtic-knots.font
https://www.dafont.com/gears-icons.font
https://www.dafont.com/eutemia-ornaments.font
https://www.dafont.com/freeribbons.font
https://www.dafont.com/arabesque-ornaments.font
https://www.dafont.com/spiroface.font

See what a great variety of ideas for icons and decorative pieces there are in fonts? And if you use a vector program, you can easily hack a character from a font into exactly what you need since they're already vectorized. And if you can't find what you need you can then save an .svg and put it into your own font in Birdfont to use in your maps. I have made a few fonts including my handwriting, a comic lettering font, and of course a map symbols font though I've never publicly released any yet!

Hopefully that helps you understand how this map was created. But let's not kid around... I spent about 80 hours painting this map. T_T

Best
Ti

[Greason Wolfe]

The thing that gets me about some of your maps is how effectively you use what most people wouldn't think of as traditional map colors. Another fine piece.

[Ralgo]

Thank you. I didn't use Photoshop for any of this artwork, actually. I used Other World Mapper, Affinity Designer and Clip Studio Paint! However, you could achieve a similar result by painting in Photoshop, I just like Clip Studio Paint's handling of the stabilizer tool and the way the paint brushes and smudge tools can be set up better than Photoshop's equivalent, and Affinity Designer better than Illustrator.

Let me break down what I did for you.

First, I used Other World Mapper to set up a vector base for the land shape and river / lake shapes. I like to use this program because it lets me keep these elements as vectors to be edited later. I export them as a multi-layer PNG so that I can clip my paintings to them or paint underneath them, in the case of the coastline.

The underlying color for the water and basic land texture is made with a bunch of different textures sandwiched with various blend modes and then merged.

The 'coastline' effect is a combination of a custom wave brush I made and a bit of hand painting with an airbrush. The foam closest to the edge is the custom wave brush, and that I duplicated and set one of the layers to a darker color and offset it a little bit. The spreading fade is done by airbrushing and then using a 'finger painting' smudge brush in Clip Studio Paint. This is one of the things you can't do in Photoshop because the smudge tools work very differently. In CSP my brush for this is just set to drag the paint without adding new color to it, not 'blur' the paint. This lets me make the swirly effect you see as the water fades. You see this well around Ioforia.

Now we move on to the land.

The desert is a combination of the finger smudge shading (that's the dark ridges) and then 2 major texture layers, one of which has the big cracks and one has the little cracks. This all goes over top one other layer that's done with a very simple brush that you could duplicate in Photoshop, a hard round that's set to about 50% opacity and pressure sensitive for opacity.

That kind of brush is used for most of the land base painting, for the mountains and tundra as well. Then the mountains got a few more layers, including one where I used a smudge brush to add streaks of snow and one where I used a stock photo of a mountain and painted the actual mountain texture on an overlay layer using a clone paint brush, and one where I used a scattering brush to add broken up little clumps of snow. This took a very long time. The volcano got a few more layers where I painted on glow, screen layers to give it that iridescent color you can see, some with a hard brush with the opacity set to about 50% and some with an airbrush set to 100% opacity but pressure sensitive for opacity.

The forests are done with a few different brushes but they all have in common that they scatter dots around. One is a tube full of about 30 different trees with a 'watercolor edge' to automatically give it some shadow, one is like that but with a bushy shaped ribbon instead, you can really see the effect of using the bushy one with a 'watercolor edge' near Lagoria. Then there's a couple that are just dots that get scattered like an airbrush, with different degrees of severity. One of them has just sharp opaque pixel rounds, one has larger fuzzier dot clumps, one of them has leaf shapes that scatter. I vary that and the color in order to get the variegation of the forest. The same technique is used in the field, only I did a couple of passes where I also added some lines to suggest fields and hills with an airbrush.

The cities and windmills are broken up into a couple of different layers, but they all have one thing in common: a black stroke on the layer style. This lets me avoid inking and then coloring, I just draw straight in with the color. I drew the bases of the buildings on one layer using a brick and stone ribbon brush, and then I used the layer above it to do the windows and trim. Then I put one more layer with a glow layer style underneath the cities and added a bit of glow behind them, which I smeared around with the finger painting brush I mentioned before, and then a layer above it with a glowing style that was partly opaque to give a bit of lighting/shadow on the cities. And then I did one more layer set to multiply where I added a bit of shadow around the base of the cities, and yet another layer above that where I painted in a bit of forest/foliage to cover the edges of the city icons. I used the same concept, a layer with a stroke on it, to add a few spots of rocks around the edges of the lakes and whatnot, those aren't part of the underlying coastline.

At some point I also merged all of the layers together and did a little bit of manual blending with the some other blenders, but not too much because I aim to have some visible edges to my paint strokes, to make it look painted instead of completely digitally rendered.

I also went around and added lighthouses on the city layers and then a glow/dodge layer to do the lighthouse beams, and added whales and boats in the ocean. The boats are made from 2 base boats with a few variations in flag/color/visibility of the lines, as well as skewing them a bit. The cities/windmills/docks/lighthouses are all drawn in as unique elements for their positioning, but I cheated a little with the boats. I don't think the average viewer would notice that it's actually just 2 boats with variations.

The final finishing touch was some mist and fog layers where I used an airbrush to do the fog around the top of the mountains and smoke from the cities.

Let's make no mistake, to get this style you just have to spend ages building things up with many layers on different blend styles, using a variety of brushes. You'll end up with dozens of layers if not a hundred, and it will take a long time. Don't ink it first, a rough sketch will do to hold your concept. Just make the base shape of the continent as something you can use as a clipping mask. Paint the colors in as big color blocks to start, and then start rendering those blocks into more detailed components by putting layers over top of them. Like the mountain did not start as a mountain OUTLINE, but instead a big triangular shape of solid grey with a shadow on one side.

To get this result use digital painting and concept art techniques, focusing on setting up blocks of color first and then rendering in depth of contrast and color variation. I used a good 10 different shapes and styles of brushes, and only the one with a bunch of tiny trees in it was a "map making" brush I made, the rest were all paintly style brushes, with the foliage ones being the middle ground. More than half of them I made myself, to match the feel of my own hand.

Some people would reach this result by painting entirely in black and white and then coloring over top of that, but I work in color from the start and everything after that is just painting over, building depth, adding contrast, adding detail, spending 8 hours on a single mountain... this is not my fastest style by far.

Finally, I mentioned I used Affinity Designer. That's where the finishing vector components come in: the text, the icons, the label. CSP and OWM are both quite limited in their text controls and I prefer the results of using a vector program for the text pass. The icons come from a font which lets me position them right in the label. A common mistake I see in new cartographer's work is not having the icon lined up with the text, it really should be either at the beginning or the end of your text label for maximum clarity, and putting in the icon with a font, using two fonts in the text box, will allow you to line it up perfectly and have the same layer style as the rest of the text. I've been doing it this way lately because I really like the consistency of having the town / city / fort type markers matching my text style.

While this map didn't end up with a legend, the different markers on the labels are indicating from my client's sketch, two different species with the colors and the different faction cities with the markers.

I use the free program Birdfont to make my own fonts, you can make any vector shape and load it up in there to save things as a font, but you can also find many great free for commercial use fonts on Dafont with symbols that work perfectly for cartography markers. In this map, I used a symbol font for the markers for the cities. Just be sure to look at the license before you download them because some are only free for personal use. Of course Windows comes with the Wingdings fonts, that's a good start, but here are some others that will work well for the same kind of purpose.

Here's some examples of fonts that you might use for map decor and markers!

This is the one I used for the markers on this map: https://www.dafont.com/haus-ethnik-dingbats.font

And here's a bunch of others that are 100% free for whatever use:
https://www.dafont.com/mayan-glyphs.font
https://www.dafont.com/history-icons.font
https://www.dafont.com/ikatan.font
https://www.dafont.com/chinese-zodiac-tfb.font
https://www.dafont.com/damgram.font
https://www.dafont.com/garlic-salt-extras.font
https://www.dafont.com/laurus-nobilis.font
https://www.dafont.com/cornpop.font
https://www.dafont.com/vintage-frames.font
https://www.dafont.com/calligraphic-frames-soft.font
https://www.dafont.com/deco-mix.font
https://www.dafont.com/celtic-knots.font
https://www.dafont.com/gears-icons.font
https://www.dafont.com/eutemia-ornaments.font
https://www.dafont.com/freeribbons.font
https://www.dafont.com/arabesque-ornaments.font
https://www.dafont.com/spiroface.font

See what a great variety of ideas for icons and decorative pieces there are in fonts? And if you use a vector program, you can easily hack a character from a font into exactly what you need since they're already vectorized. And if you can't find what you need you can then save an .svg and put it into your own font in Birdfont to use in your maps. I have made a few fonts including my handwriting, a comic lettering font, and of course a map symbols font though I've never publicly released any yet!

Hopefully that helps you understand how this map was created. But let's not kid around... I spent about 80 hours painting this map. T_T

Best
Ti

Thank you very very much , you have been of great help !!!

[Tiana]

The thing that gets me about some of your maps is how effectively you use what most people wouldn't think of as traditional map colors. Another fine piece.

Thank you, Greason. I like to go bravely where no one has gone before, I think that's some of why people hire me, they like my strange vision. Though this client actually specifically asked for that blue/pink volcano!

[Tiana]

Thank you very very much , you have been of great help !!!

I should add, I drew it using a 24 inch screen Cintiq, and I do think it would be close to impossible to achieve these results without some kind of drawing tablet, though even an entry level tablet of a modest size will get you there.