Jared Blando - How to Draw Fantasy Art and RPG Maps: Step by Step Cartography for Gamers and Fans

To get that nice old parchment look, try soaking your paper in dark roast coffee. You can either use a large pan to lay the paper in, or dampen the papers and then brush on the coffee with a folded piece of paper towel. It will yellow your paper beautifully.

When you are ready to move on from pencil work, there are some tools that you will require. For traditional work, a variety of brushes is essential for painting and detail work, while inking requires specific inks or ink pens. When working digitally, you will need a tablet, stylus and Adobe Photoshop or GIMP.

After your pencil work, inking will give permanence and boldness to your map. Though most people think of inks as just bold thick lines, and indeed this is one of the techniques that can be used, inks also work well as light washes that can be brushed on to give gentle tonality. Inks come in a baffling variety of colors, though its best to stick with black, brown and red inks to start. You will need a small selection of brushes for your ink work, including nos. 00, 0 and 1 round, a no. 2 flat as well as a large 1-inch (25mm) flat watercolor brush. Calligraphy pens with interchangeable head tips, as well as Copic Multiliner brown or black ink pens are also useful, and each come in a variety of sets. Inking and its various tools are covered in a more detailed fashion in chapter 10.

Brushes come in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes, but you will need only a select few to get started. The most common brush shapes are round or flat, and most are numbered from 00 (the smallest) to 10 (the largest). Brushes also fall into three different groups: watercolor, acrylics and oils, and are grouped by bristle makeup: synthetic, natural or mixed. For adding color in mapmaking, its best to use watercolor brushes in a mixture of flats and rounds. This will be discussed in more detail in later chapters.

When working digitally, you will need a tablet and stylus. A stylus is the pen tool that has built-in pressure sensitivity to help simulate light or heavy strokes depending on how hard or soft you press. There are a few tablets that are cheap and easy to get at your local electronics shop or online, though I personally use a Wacom tablet. With multiple interchangeable nibs to simulate different surfaces, its an excellent tool for working digitally. As for software, Adobe Photoshop or GIMP (a freeware program very similar to Photoshop) are both excellent and function very similarly.

Whether you are partial to deep dark forests, tall mountains or vast plains, this chapter will teach you the techniques to bring your vision of a fictional world to the page using your pencils and imagination. We will cover some of the basic methods of laying in the various elements that will make up your fantastical world. Maps often consist of a multitude of elements that convey information to an onlooker. Rivers, hills, mountains, cities and such are all parts of a successful and interesting map, though a balance of these elements is always a good thing.