Tips on Drawing Good Roads

[Gamerprinter]

I'll very lightly place my intended roads in pencil, really to help me properly place buildings in the city. The goal in my hand-drawn maps regarding roads is that they are simply the negative space between rows of buildings. In the end, I don't draw the roads at all, they are only negative space. If you draw in 'sidewalk' areas, unless its a modern city layout the framing of the road actually destroys the realism, so I never put outlines to a road to define them. That hurts the look. By putting in some lawn and other texture where there are no roads, what is road becomes obvious.

Now when a hand-drawn map is at encounter scale or some fairly zoomed in scale, I'll hand-draw the cobblestones at a certain (larger) for road area, and smaller cobblestones in alleys, courtyards - yet at the same time I do not draw the outline of the road. At closer scale the road is defined as negative space between buildings and cobblestone textures of the road itself. Again the road becomes obvious.

As an aside for country roads, recently I've been focusing on creating a pair wagon tracks with grass and mud between the tracks, so I don't create modern graded gravel roads - to me that's way too modern looking, to the point that all roads are wagon tracks and not roads as are more commonly found in maps. Any country road that looks like a gravel path 20 feet is completely unrealistic. Roads of that concept are less than 100 years old. I'm never openly critical of others maps who stick the wide road concept (which is most every cartographer), but it my mind those lose believeability in my eyes. (I know the thread is supposed to be about urban roads, I'd just thought I'd throw that in there.)

GP