I should possibly do a tutorial on this, but anyway - hand-lettering maps. Like I mentioned, if you're doing it by hand, on a single sheet of paper, you have to do the hand-lettering first, but this is a process in itself.

1. use a pencil to sketch out the coastlines, rivers, mountains - just so you know what's where. Use a soft pencil and press lightly. This applies to the subsequent 2 steps as well.

2. use a pencil to make lines, straight or curved (see aforementioned .pdf in previous post), indicating where the lettering is going to go. When you are lettering a large region, you will usually have to s p a c e o u t the letters more to fill the whole area, so it's a good idea to have those lines as guides, so you know where the letters have to go.

3. lightly sketch where each letter goes; if you're really trying to be precise, you can use a ruler to help you space them, but I usually eye-ball it and then fix oddities digitally.

4. do the letters in ink. Depending on what look you're going for, it's important to choose the right kind of paper (smooth, rough, absorbent, bleed-proof ... depends), the right kind of pen (dip or non? calligraphy or point? modern fine-liner? calligraphic marker? brush even?*) and the right kind of ink (black? blue? sepia? red? watery or thick? lacquered?). This will take a while, but it's better to take your time, since it saves you work fixing it up later. Put on some nice music and meditate while writing. I recommend working from top-left to bottom-right if you're right-handed, just so you don't have to worry about smudging. This also applies to step 5.

5. ink the coastlines, the forests, the mountains, the cities, the roads, etc. I recommend you practice how you're going to ink them on a separate sheet of paper first. When you ink them, leave a white space around your letters, so they're nice and visible even in the middle of a black forest or high mountains.

6. wait until ALL the ink is dry. Even the spots and dots, those sometimes take much longer to dry.

7. lightly and carefully as hell erase the pencil marks. Depending on your ink and paper, if you press too hard, the eraser might lift off ink pigment as well, making your work look washed out.

8. scan your work and digitally clean it up a bit, if you want (trust me, sometimes you're going to have spelling mistakes and such, those can be fixed digitally and nobody need ever know ).

9. post your work.

Simple as pie!


*hey, there's an idea ... I should do a brush-lettered map for a joke.