The dark and foreboding wood is a staple of fantasy literature and our own folklore. The Forest looms large in the Grimm Tales – an enemy in its own right. Mirkwood, Fangorn and the Old Forest ...
This is less a tutorial, and more a note following last week’s post on drawing grasslands. The result of that tutorial strongly depend upon the background texture used and I wanted to highlight...
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 ha...
Grasslands are tricky to map. They’re large empty open expanses. But if you just flood fill an area with light green it’ll stand out like a sore thumb against your beautifully rendered mo...
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 the...
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 t...
Following my quick run down of how to draw cliffs here’s an equally quick one for drawing cliffs on isometric maps. 1. Draw the top of the cliff. Make the horizontal variations in the line lar...
So I was asked a while ago about different cliff mapping styles. Today I thought I’d break the hiatus of the last couple of weeks with a few different styles of cliffs. It’s not really a ...
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 p...
Today’s tutorial is a quick walkthrough for isometric or forced perspective mountains. This is entirely software agnostic, and is the starting point for maps like this or this. This sketch was ...
An example map using the city style - map drawn by Ralf Schemmann Today Profantasy released my new fantasy city map style for Campaign Cartographer as their March Annual style. You can check out the ...
A while ago I ran a gallery show of fantasy maps, and through that I met Christopher Merwin – a great guy and a local New York game designer. He was working on a fantasy world for the Pathfinde...
It’s been a while since I posted any work, so here’s a piece I did for Noah Murphy for his book series K23 Detectives. You can check them out on Kindle and in print. It was an interesting...
Today I’m walking through my method for colouring trees quickly for RPG maps. This follows on from this mini-tute/discussion on different tree styles from last week. I’m working with styl...
Simple brushes without angle jitter As before, create a grungy inkblot image -but this time, create it with a transparent background (images 1). Save this as a .gbr file (the Gimp brush format), and ...
One incredibly useful tool in photoshop is a good dynamic grungy brush. The human eye looks for detail and texture, or patterns and regularity. If you use a hard edged round brush in your work, there...
I was asked the following question over on the Paizo boards: Can I ask a question about city design? I see advice I’ve seen elsewhere — start with the streets. But — how? How do you...
Trees are useful on a battlemap as they provide terrain, cover and a lot of artistic style. As the canopy stretches over the play area, how you depict your trees will affect both the form and the fun...
How do you take a line art map like this one and colour it up? An isometric map is a little trickier than a top down map. As there aren’t hard edges for the walls it’s tricky to set up a ...
It’s often the case that you find that you have a map from an adventure that has labels on it. You need to remove the labels before you show it to your players or they’ll know where the b...
This week I’m looking at how to take published maps, rescale them for miniature or virtual tabletop use and then slice them up for printing at home. How to resize a map for virtual table...
A couple of weeks ago I posted the world map for Lannithir, for the Illfrost adventure arc for Illusionary Press. The first adventure for the world of Illfrost is out now and I created the tactical b...
This week it’s all about the dungeon, and I’ve been covering ways of creating dungeon maps without actually drawing anything. These tips should work whether you’re a natural doodler...
Castle Defence – a classic gatehouse Castles are built for more than one reason – people live there, guards are stationed there and often they are political power centers for the region. ...
Last year I started a series of quick mapping tips, meant to be read over lunch, that would cover a series of different questions. These are posted daily to my Google+ and Facebook pages. Rather than...
This month sees the release of Illfrost, a new world for 4e. Its icy grip is perfectly timed as winter descends our own frozen north. I worked with the guys at Illusionary Press to create the world ...
A new edition of Wayfinder, the perennial free fan created magazine for the Pathfinder game, is out. In issue #6 the Paizonians have headed north to the frozen lands of the Linnorm Kings. The magazin...
Piracy is in the air this year. Open Design is now well underway with Journeys to the West – an anthology of adventurers set in the exotic unexplored western ocean – and Paizo is set fair...
You might have noticed something of a theme over the last few weeks. The map packs I’ve been putting out have had a decidedly frigid air to them. These packs come from the critically acclaimed ...
Today I’m covering a quick way to layout a city and make it look pretty and easy to read. As with the previous post, this originally appeared on my G+ and facebook pages. 3 steps to an attracti...
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