About a month ago, I posted some shots of a digital map that I was working on.

It wasn't really a map, though… more of an illustration.  Sure, there was some forest, a river, cliffs, lakes, and a town—but there were no labels.  As anyone who has ever tried using a map knows, those tend to come in handy.  There were were also no farms.  Those come in handy too.  I had thought about these things, but found some satisfactory rationalizations (just a fancy word for excuses, I know), for leaving my map like it was.  Among them:

"I just made this map for practice in illustration.  It doesn't matter if it isn't really finished."

"I don't even know or care anything about this place.  When I make a map for fantasy places that are real official, I'll label them and all that."

"How do I illustrate farms?  If I try to draw fields on there, I'll probably just mess up the artistic unity of it.  The same goes for labels—those would totally clutter up my nice, neat illustration."

"I don't want to come up with that many names, anyways.  I'm so bad at names that the secondary villain in the book I'm writing doesn't even have a name, and place names are a step worse than people names."

These are all nice, devious, insidious rationalizations.  But, as I observed, rationalization is effectively synonymous with excuse, and the term excuse carries some justifiably negative connotations.   (more…)

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. (more…)