Jonathan Roberts' blog, Fantastic Maps, is a gold mine filled with fabulous tips, tricks, and tutorials on digital cartography of fantasy worlds. Inspired by his beautiful maps, I've been trying some digital cartography myself in the last few months. I did my first trying at fully digital maps in Adobe Sketch, but have been much happier with Procreate—which I think is, right now, The Art App for iPad. Procreate is awesome, and in it I have made my first completed fully digital map. Why all the "first completed fully digital"? Because I've tried drawing a map physically and then tracing it into the iPad, where I colored and finished it—and, of course, I have some unfinished digital maps.
So, on Fantastic Maps I found a tutorial for drawing trees. I went over to Procreate and started trying to draw a tree. It was this.
Yes, I know. It is an exceptionally bad tree. Bear with me.
Because then I reflected that drawing one tree probably wasn't very good practice for drawing forests, even if my one tree had been any good. So I drew this:
A lot better? A lot better! The hut and well, though, didn't match the map very nicely, and the trees were a little too fuzzy. (I added the hut and well so that the map was a bit more of a map, rather than just being a picture of some trees.) I know that the line drawings are supposed to come first, but I decided that late was better than never, and added some definition lines to the trees.
Even with the lines, this isn't much of a map—after all, you can probably see the hut from the well and the well from the hut. The map that I'm working on now would (if it was of a real place, that is) be a rather more useful one. I'm not completely happy with this map, but I'm not sure how to fix it—so here you go!
I know this is a month old so you might have moved on but I recommend that maps need labels of their features i.e. waterfall name, cliff names, forest A, forest B, lake A, Lake B, road names, and town names. Additionally I would suggest adding some farms outside the city and giving them names. Another road or another town would really flesh it out too.
Those are great ideas, thank you! Right now my maps really are more of illustrations… and I’m not sure how the people in this town eat. 🙂 I will definitely conquer my naming laziness and work on what you suggest.
I like your analysis as you went along!
Thank you!