Fantasy Cartography with Adobe Photoshop - YouTube Video Tutorials

[Dowly]

Hey, and thanks for another awesome tutorial!

I am a total newbie to fantasy maps and hand-drawn methods, so this really helped a lot.

Can't think of anything to improve, you're doing a good job.

EDIT: Oh wait, actually, I was wondering if you use your own custom brushes when you draw (I am assuming you use a tablet?) or the stock brushes PS comes with?

[rpgmapmaker]

I was wondering if you use your own custom brushes when you draw (I am assuming you use a tablet?) or the stock brushes PS comes with?

I use a WACOM INTUOS4 "Tablet". I am not sure I know any Photoshop users (with tablets) that don't use custom brushes to draw. I use custom brushes the way a mechanic uses a wrench set... each brush "Custom" or "Stock" has a use and each has brush settings that can change many of its attributes...

"Drawing" is many things in Photoshop, for basic practice, messing around, or rough sketching ideas I mostly use the standard hard round brush. I have brushes that make it look like I am using a pencil, Pen, Brush, blood, guts, and the kitchen sink (as they say). I think the part that most people don't fully get about the brushes/settings in Photoshop is that they are just tools (very versatile and very powerful) but just tools.

Most men "buy" lots of tools and have one for everything they might need to do home/car maintenance. Having the "special" tool for the job is about 30% of home/car maintenance and the rest is about having a small group of "standard" tools that "fix" the 70% of everything else. Photoshop is no different, having and properly using the "special" custom tools is great, but if you don't use and understand the "standard" stuff you might end up with a mess on your hands. You can do many things with the standard Photoshop brushes that are non-standard.

So the long and short is yes and yes :-)

I use:
1.) Self-made custom brushes
2.) Self-made custom brushes with custom brush settings
3.) Standard PS brushes
4.) Standard PS brushes with custom brush settings
5.) Other people's custom brushes
6.) Other people's custom brushes with custom brush settings

-RPGMM