THE LEARNING ARCHIVES
Whether you're creating maps for a novel, rpg, or just for fun, this collection of tutorials and map tips will help you create more professional and believable maps for your story!
Population Size for a Village, Town, or City - What’s Believable?
What is a realistic population size for a medieval or ancient fantasy setting? Should a city have a couple of million people? How about 500,000 or 20,000? Let’s delve in and give you some simple guidelines as well as a cheat sheet you can easily reference as you are writing your story and drawing your map!
Creating a River On Your City Maps with The City Map Builder
What is the best way to create a river on your map using the City Map Builder? Adding buildings, forests, and other features is pretty straight forward, but how do you add something like a stream flowing through your settlement? In this tutorial I’ll walk you through my favorite method so you can easily add some interesting rivers to your maps!
How to Create and Shade City Walls
In this tutorial, I will show you how to build fortifications for your settlement using the brushes included in the City Map Builder. And even if you don’t own that particular tool, there will be plenty to glean and apply to your own hand-drawn city maps!
How to Create a Hill Shrine with the City Map Builder
How can you use the grassland brushes included in the City Map Builder to create a Hill Shrine? Here you’ll find some tips on using the grassland brushes so you can begin using them to create interesting settings of your own on your fantasy maps.
And if you’re drawing everything by hand rather than using the map builder, stick around and you’ll find a lot of helpful tips you can apply to your own work.
How to Draw a Water Wheel Mill
How do you turn grain into flour without electricity? One of the most effective methods was to harness the power of water to turn a large water wheel, which would turn a great stone that would grind large quantities of grain into flour. Including a water wheel on your city or village map is a great way to give another layer of interest and realism to your fantasy setting.
How to Draw Forests - Top Down Perspective
You’re city or village map is just about done, but you need to add some trees to breathe some life into the surrounding landscape. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how you can draw some simple trees that will stand out and really make your fantasy map pop!
How to Draw a City Block
City maps can be a lot of fun to draw, but they come with their own unique set of challenges. It’s one thing to draw individual buildings that are completely isolated from one another; it’s another to draw a city block where everything is more mashed together. In this tutorial I’ll walk you through my process to sketching, inking, and finally coloring a city block so you can add them to your own fantasy maps!
Drawing Cliffs on Coastlines in Top Down Perspective
One of the biggest challenges with fantasy maps in a top down perspective is they tend to look a bit flat. Fortunately, there are some simple tricks you can use to build up the layers of the landscape to give a sense of depth. In this Map Tip we’ll be looking at how to draw cliffs on a coastline in this perspective and make them really stand out in your map.
Drawing Cliffs in Different Perspectives
When you sit down to draw a fantasy map for your story, one of the first things to decide is the perspective you’ll use. The most common tend to be isometric and top down, but which should you use? Here we will look at some of the benefits of each using something like cliffs to show some of the differences.
How to Shade Oceans & Seas on Your Maps
In this tutorial I want to show you how to give your oceans & seas a little more character. Not only will you get a nice painterly texture, but this method is also a great way to hint at the topography just below the water’s surface.