For me, this whole process was exciting! Seeing your imagination come to life – turning the world in your head into something more tangible – it felt like a sneak-peek into what it might be like for an author to hold their bound, published book for the first time.

So begins the map-making tutorial!

Mapping out a fantasy world:

Step 1: Unceremoniously draw a map on some scrap paper. I drew mine in a spiral notebook. Author Holly Lisle does this, only she recommends you do this step with a pen. That way, any mistakes cannot be erased. The argument being ‘mistakes’ can become good world history or back-story, such as a sudden unnatural right angled jut in your river could have been man-made: Maybe the nobles redirected the water away from the poorer cities. Or maybe the poor people channeled the water away from the nobles! Maybe a tear in the paper could become a rift to another dimension. Maybe a coffee ring could become a land that has been cursed for centuries. Well, you get the idea. I was more concerned with approximate placements for cities, so I drew arrows with some paths some of my characters have taken. I also liberally X’d out parts I didn’t like.->

Step 2: Re-draw your map on similar paper based on what you learned. Try to make it a rough draft of your final product (try to make it look natural). A pencil and an eraser is highly recommended at this point.->

Step 3: Draw the outlines of your landmass(es) as large as you can on good sketchbook paper. I selected paper about the same size as my scanner bed, and drew on it using a mechanical pencil.->

Step 4: Draw terrain. Try to draw it lightly – preferrably lighter than the outline of the landmass(es). In fact, you may want to use a lighter-toned pencil entirely.
With my terrain I tried for an overhead 3-D effect, but simple upside-down V’s for mountains work just as well. Snaking lines coming off of mountains still work for rivers, and speckled dots still make great deserts.->

Really, at this point, you can just label your cities, maybe color it with colored pencils. The rest of the steps are going to be more about trying to make this map looking nice using digital rendering.

Step 5: Scan it at 200 DPI (or higher) and save it as a good, non-lossy format. I chose PNG, but BMP would have been another good choice.
JPG is an example of a lossy format: good for saving pictures to view later, but bad for pictures you want to work with digitally.
Whenever I have a drawing that is too big to scan, I take a photo of it with a 7.2 Megapixel digital camera and crop it – seems to work just as well.

Step 6: Open the file into your favorite image editing program. Some great ones out there are OpenCanvas, Adobe Photoshop, and The Gimp. I loaded mine into Adobe Photoshop CS2. There are actual map-making programs out there that use vectors, such as AutoREALM. Frankly, I wasn’t very impressed with them. At first, the fractal edges look impressive, but the end effect is a map that doesn’t look very organic.

Step 7: I’m going to assume you are using Adobe Photoshop or know your way around whichever program you are using at this point. Go to image->adjustments->brightness/contrast. Bring your brightness level to about -50 and your contrast level to about +50. You should start to notice your mechanical pencil lines will look more like they were done with an ink pen! Another great effect you get: the paper’s imperfections become magnified, giving it more of an old map look.->

Step 8: Create a layer underneath your map. (layer->new->layer. Then layer->new->layer from background.) What I did at that point was make only the back layer visible and create a dark-brown to black gradient. Really, you can play around with blue if you’d like to create ocean water, or whatever you’d like.

Step 9: I jumped back into my map layer and cut away some of the ‘paper ocean’ with the magic wand tool, revealing the brown gradient below (much like my previous rendered map with no terrain – pictured.)->

Step 10: I zoomed into the map and began scribbling pixels, (1px, pressure-sensitive) trying to pay homage to the terrain I had drawn, stick to ‘earthy’ colors: Browns, greys, greens, and tans. Then I would blur them with the blur tool (brush size-11, strength-19%)->

Step 11: I went over the pixelwork with the burn tool (range-midtones, exposure-67%) and tried to create the illusion of depth and shadows.->

Step 12: You can add small details with splashes of color, such as white for snow. Or, in this case, I decided to add a little bit of blue around every landform to indicate water, with no intention of filling up the rest of the map. (paintbrush size-11, mode-luminosity, opacity-18%, flow-100%)->

Step 13: The parts of the map that are on land but have a grainy look to them from what was done in step 7 with brightness/contrast look great with use of the burn tool alone. You get sandy rocks and ledges. Also in this screenshot, you can see the same settings for water was used on the lake, then applied the burn tool to achieve a beautiful wave effect.->

Step 14: For these light etchings on the water surface, I used the lasso tool to select the lake and applied a plastic wrap filter. The rocks began to look more like a painting with use of the accented edges filter.->

Step 15: For the plains in the north-east, I used a diffuse glow filter.

Step 16: I traced the paths of the rivers I had drawn in that same luminescent blue, trying to change the thickness of the river depending on the elevation. I went ahead and extended the blue around the continent’s perimeter.

Step 17: I created a layer between the continent and the background, and rendered clouds using brown tones, increasing the transparency enough to let the gradient bleed through. I also added a render lighting effect-spotlight, sourced at the southeast corner.

Step 18: I went ahead and set up a grid by creating a new transparent file and drew a line along the bottom and right side of the canvas. Then I made it into a pattern (edit->define pattern). I created a new layer above my map and chose the fill tool and chose fill pattern. I also created a compass. I found a few different compasses I liked by doing google searches and sketched out my own mish-mash of the different ideas in greyscale. After I had colored it in, I applied an emboss filter, and it looked something like a white knitted snowflake. To finish it, using the magic wand tool, I selected the whole thing and filled it with a gradient from yellow to black, creating a gold emblem look.->

Step 19: I finished it off by labelling some of the cities. Each time you type a name, it is created in a new layer, so the location of the cities is still very flexible!->

Well, I learned a ton going through this ~ It’s probably one of those things you get better and better at with practice. I know I learned a ton that would come in handy a second-time through. I hope you had as much fun following along as I did making the map. If anybody ends up making their world map using some of the techniques I developed here, I’d love to see it!

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