Here I’ve shown two types of forest, coniferous and deciduous, and I’m working in 3/4 view as before.

1. Draw in the outlines of the forests. For deciduous forests, use rounded lines. For conifers, use sharp vertical strokes. Don’t worry about keeping the border complete. We’re just showing the edge, it doesn’t have to be perfect. Make sure the forest flows around hills and mountain edges. The forest’s movement will help to delineate the hills and mountains, making them easier to pick out.
2. Add the details. Fill in the areas around the edges of the forest. Try to make sure that lines and features tend to join up horizontally rather than vertically. This will help to sell the 3/4 perspective. Also, make sure you detail forest along ridges and edges. This gives shape and form to your forests, and helps the viewer see the hills beneath the trees. As before, use curving lines for deciduous forest and sharp vertical lines for conifers. If you’re doing a black and white map, congratulations! You’re done. But if you want colour, read on.
3. Base colours. Here I’ve shied away from my standard parchment background. Instead I’ve laid in the base colour on a new layer (under the lines) set to Normal blend, 100% opacity. I used some large grungy brushes with low opacity to build up the colours. You want to start with the lights and then build up to the darks. For the forest, I set colour jitter on the brush settings and added scatter to the brush. This gives a dappled spread of slightly varying greens, which is perfect for selling the varied colours of a forest. I use a yellower green for the deciduous and a bluer green for the conifers. I also take a low opacity dark blue and add a shadow around the base of the trees. It’s subtle – but it immediately nails down the forest as a 3/4 view forest with some bulk. It makes a big difference.
4. Colour detail. Here I’ve added a new layer, with overlay blend mode and 100% opacity. First use dark blue and grungy brush to lay in shadow across the forest. Then I use a very light yellow to pick out the bright highlights on the deciduous forest, and a very light turquoise on the conifers. Again, use rounded shapes for the deciduous trees, and vertical spikes on the conifers.

And we’re done! You can find more tips and tricks on the tutorials page.

To recap, the original grass image (Panel 1 in the attached image) is a combination of four layers: 10% normal green, 100% overlay green, 100% overlay light and dark, and a final colour burn layer for the dark grass tuft details. All of these layers allow the background texture/colour to show through and the overlay and colour burn layers actually depend upon the background colour/texture for their results. So the choice of textured background is critical.

Here I’ve taken the same set of layers and dropped different backgrounds (all from cgtextures.com) in behind them. I’ll go through them one by one to explain what’s going on:

1. Parchment – as before. Here we see the results from last week’s grassland tutorial, re-used here to provide a datum for comparison.
2. Paper. This is a straightforward paper texture with roughy the same tone as the original parchment. You can see all the grassland, and it looks pretty nice. However the fact that the background is much less saturated than the parchment, and specifically less yellow, completely changes the feel of the grass. It could be some wintry tundra if it looked like this.
3. White background. So here we pretty much just see the 10% normal layer. Overlay layers lighten and darken the colours beneath them. It’s not a linear relationship, meaning if you have a light background, you’re going to need a lot of dark overlay layers to build up a shadow, but a little white on an overlay layer will brighten it up quickly. If the background’s white, you’ll never get any purchase with dark overlay layers. The lesson? Make sure you’re background has a tone somewhere near the middle between light and dark (open up the Levels dialog and make sure the hump is somewhere near the middle).
4. Here I’ve used 50% grey. So having just said that overlay layers have trouble lightening dark backgrounds, and trouble darkening light backgrounds, if the background is exactly 50% grey then light colours on overlay layers will lighten it and dark colours darken it just fine. So you can see we get a perfectly respectable result here, but the background isn’t adding anything to the image here.
5. Rock. Here I’ve just dropped in a rock background. The colours over the top are perfectly visible as they combine well with the greys (as in 4.). However the detail on the rock overwhelms the detail in the art over the top. It’s as if we’ve ink washed a slab of granite – less a painting on the rock, and more like painted rock. The darkest shadows are coming from the texture – which is generally something you want to avoid.
6. Earth. As with the rock texture, the texture dominates. If I were to use this, I’d lower the opacity of the earth texture so that it suggests the texture rather than shouting it.

I hope that shows a few of the pitfalls and opportunities for using texture as the base for a map, and how that interacts with overlay/burn layers. Let me know if you have any questions.

In 2011 I was commissioned to create a map of the world of Ilkor for the browser game Ilkor: Dark Rising. The brief was to use a style inspired by the classic Middle Earth maps. Recently GAD Games have released a few of the detail views that I did for them so I get to show them off! I’ll have to wait a little for the full world map to be released, but for now, here’s the detail views:

Every commission has it’s challenges, and in this one it was trying to get the painterly strokes for the features – and drawing all those sea lines by hand. I really got comfortable with the new dynamic brushes in Photoshop on this commission, something I’ll be using more of in the future.

You can find out more about the game behind the maps over at the blog for GAD Games: http://gadgames.com/blog/

These images are all © GAD Games, used with permission.

I’ve found that the following works well for grasslands:

1. Lay in the base colour

• Take two shades of mid-green and turn on colour jitter with Foreground/Background jitter set to 100% – this’ll give you a nice varying green, which helps to break up the monotonous uniformity of a green expanse.
• Use a large grungy brush (such as this case:https://plus.google.com/100445521601957994193/posts/gwxwfW6zYgM) and set it to low opacity (20-30%?) and block in your grassland. This should give you something that looks a little like 1 in the attached image. This is a little dark, and a little solid green for my liking – I like to let the background texture bleed through.

2. Play with some blend modes

• Duplicate the layer
• Set the bottom layer to 10% with Normal blend mode
• Set the top layer to 100% Overlay (if that makes no sense, see yesterday’s post on Blend Modes:https://plus.google.com/100445521601957994193/posts/VWD2Gb6m2g4
• that should give you a nice mid green colour with some good colour variation, that should look something like 2 above. Honestly, you can leave it at that, and it’ll look fine. But if you want to switch it up a bit more:

3. Add some detail

• Create a new layer over the top and set the blend mode to Overlay. First block in a dark blue with roughly 10-20% opacity. Use horizontal strokes – this will help to reinforce the isometric perspective of your map.
• Now go over the same layer with a very light yellow (almost white) also with horizontal strokes, and again at low opacity
• This should give you some nice light/dark variation in your grassland without breaking anything.
• Finally finish it off with a few dark green grass tufts scattered around using a thin brush (2-3 pixels, or 5 px if you’re using a pressure sensitive stylus).

If you’d like to check out the psd file for this, you can get it here. Feel free to share this around to anyone who might find it useful. As always, you can check out previous tutorials here.

Blend modes are a wonderful feature of Photoshop, and also appear in many other programs, including Gimp. Here’s a few I use regularly. I’ve taken the same styles o text and shown how they appear using the different blend modes. Further down, you can see the effect of using a selection of different gradients and setting them to the relevant blend mode. There’s a breakdown of each blend mode after the jump.

Overlay

This is a great blend mode for making an image look integrated into the background texture. Using overlay gradually shifts the tone and colour of the background texture. In the case of the text, you can see that it takes more than one overlay layer stacked up to get text that’s dark enough – but once it gets there it a thick saturated brown that fits well with the colour scheme of the parchment. In contrast, even with one layer of overlay, the light letters are almost white. This is because the starting texture is very light.

Overlay tends to increase the saturation of the background texture – so when we have colour gradients set to overlay you can see the colours remain highly saturated.

50% grey set to overlay will produce no effect at all. It will be indistinguishable from a transparent area on the overlay layer.

Soft Light

Soft light is similar in many ways to overlay, but tends to be much less saturated. You can see this difference in the letters of SOFT, and also in the gradients. I tend to play with both of these on a map, to see what gives the nicer result.

Soft light and overlay layers are a good way to give the impression of watercolour washes on a map, as they allow so much of the background colour and texture to shine through.

Colour Burn

Colour burn is a very different beast. Firstly – like all ‘burn’ modes – it will only ever darken your image. White is effectively transparent when set to colour burn as you can see from the gradients at the bottom.

Colour burn darkens the background image, has a high saturation and gives vibrant colours. As with overlay and soft light, it takes the background colour as it’s starting point and transforms it. So even in the solid blue on the bottom gradient, you can still see the parchment texture, and you can see that the colour is greener than the actual blue – the effect of the background’s colour.

Colour burn gives great results if you want to grunge up a parchment background. Get some splatter brushes and some low to mid saturation colours (like the low saturation red on COLOUR) and go wild. You’ll have a bloodstained muddy parchment in no time.

Multiply

Multiply is a different beast yet again. Where the previous three blend modes combine with the background texture, multiply masks it. Multiply takes the brightness of a colour and turns it into transparency. So light colours like yellow, white or light blue will be transparent, where darker colours are more opaque. For dark colours, none of the background will show through. Multiply is a great way of laying a black and white image over a parchment. Se the layer to multiply and voila – the white is gone, leaving only the black lines.

I hope that’s useful and gives you some ideas on how to use blend modes in your mapmaking and art work. They might look mysterious to start with, but play around with them and you’ll soon find they give wonderful and surprising results.

As always, you can find more tips on the tutorial page on my blog:http://fantasticmaps.wordpress.com/category/tips-and-tricks/

It’s official! I am working on the maps for A Song of Ice and Fire by George RR Martin. The image above is an early mockup of the cover and the full map folio is due to come out in October of this year. Now obviously I can’t say too much about the project, but here’s the description from the product page:

George R. R. Martin’s beloved Song of Ice and Fire series, which started with A Game of Thrones, is bursting with a variety and richness of landscapes—from bitter tundra to arid wasteland and everything in between—that provide a sense of scale unrivaled in contemporary fantasy. Now this dazzling set of maps, featuring original artwork from illustrator and cartographer Jonathan Roberts, transforms Martin’s epic saga into a world as fully realized as the one around us.

The centerpiece of this gorgeous collection is guaranteed to be a must-have for any fan: the complete map of the known world, joining the lands of the Seven Kingdoms and the lands across the Narrow Sea for the first time in series history. But this is just one of many unique maps that aren’t available anywhere else. There is an alternate version that tracks the movements of the series’ protagonists throughout their vast world, along with more detailed versions of the western, middle, and eastern thirds of the world; a full map of Westeros, combining North and South; one of the Dothraki Sea and the Red Wastes; and the Braavos city map. And here, too, are fan favorites detailing everything from urban sprawl to untamed wilds: maps of King’s Landing; The Wall and Beyond the Wall; the Free Cities; and Slaver’s Bay, Valyria, and Sothyros.

Never before has the entire scope of Martin’s universe been so exhaustively and fascinatingly depicted. The maps in this beautiful, one-of-a-kind atlas will enrich your reading or viewing experience, provide another view of your favorite characters’ epic journeys, and open up captivating new worlds—plus, they’ll look great on any castle wall.

It’s hugely exciting to be involved in a project set in a world I’ve followed for so long. You can find out more information on the project here and here, and the Amazon page here.

1. Draw the top of the cliff. Make the horizontal variations in the line larger than the vertical variations. This will sell the cliff as being viewed side on.

2. Draw the vertical edges. These should come down from every ‘wiggle’ in your cliff top line. Give them different lengths and allow your hand to wiggle a little giving them some jitter.

3. Add some ground lines for the base of the cliff. These represent the run off of debris from the cliff and give the cliff a well defined base. Just like a figure drawing needs a floor and feet to ground it, a cliff needs a base to settle it into the map. Add a few lines around the top to suggest the lie of the land around the top of the cliff and allow the top to blend into the map.

That’s it! Would it be useful to follow this with a rundown of how to colour this up?

As always, you can find previous tutes on G+ by searching for #fmtips or over on the tutorials page of my blog: http://fantasticmaps.wordpress.com/category/tips-and-tricks/

1. Classic cliffs

This is a symbolic style – a very abstract representation of a cliff. It’s used a lot on current maps. The advantage is that is clearly designates the cliff, shows where the edge is, and indicates which side is the top and which the bottom. The downside is that it’s not particularly illustrative. These are great for abstracted regional scale maps and old school dungeon maps.

2. Illustrative cliffs

Here we have the opposite approach. The cliff is drawn to give some impression of how it would look from above. You tend not to see the vertical lines in the cliff. Instead you see all the ledges as you look down. Where the edges are close together you can see that it’s steep, where they are more spread out you can see a more gradual rise. Throw in some fallen rocks at the bottom – all cliffs have them – and some lines showing the smaller rubble that’s run off from the cliff. This is a good style for battlemaps, where you might want to give an indication of different routes up the cliff, but bad for regional maps where the scale makes this style inappropriate.

3. A compromise

Finally we have a style that acts as a compromise. The edge of the cliff is clearly shown. The structure of the cliff is indicated by the perpendicular lines. I’ve added more structure and variation. This gives a more illustrative feel to the style in 1. without sacrificing clarity. I’ve found this works well on world or regional scale maps where you need to indicate a cliff, and have it blend in with a more illustrative style.

I hope that’s useful! As ever, feel free to share this around to others who might find this handy. You can check out older tutorials on the Tutorials page or over on G+.

Right now everything in my RPGNow store is discounted for the GMs Day Sale! Check out the full range of map packs here, from windswept keeps to a lava filled dragon’s lair, from square rigged pirate galleons to a kraken infested shipwreck in the briny deep. Or pick up the critically acclaimed Breaking of Forstor Nagar for the bargain price of $6.99.

Sending hapless adventurers to an icy grave has never been so economical.

This sketch was drawn with a pen, but can equally be done in Gimp with a mouse, or Photoshop with a tablet.

1. Define the silhouettes for your mountains. They can be jagged, they can be smooth. Allow your hand to wander and create different shapes. It helps to start with the closest mountain (bottom of the page) and work to the farthest (top of the page)
2. Draw the ridge line. Start at the highest point on a mountain and draw a ridge line to the next in the line of mountains. Don’t draw directly to the next peak, offset the end of the line. That will make it look like the ridge drops down and then comes up the far side where it’s hidden from the viewer.
3. Add in the details. Here I’ve taken lines from all of the mini-peaks and drawn flowing lines down the sides of the mountains. Add in a few secondary ridge lines running off down to ground level (like the second mountain from the top on the left hand side)

At this point you have your mountain range. Any more detail added with colour or tone will add to the effect, but you can leave it at this and it’ll read just fine as a mountain range. This tip originally appeared on G+ and on facebook.