Hello fellow cartographers.

Noticing a distinct lack of material for Paint.NET (from now on called "PDN") - and being dared by RPMiller - I decided to put together a short tutorial on how to create a map with PDN in a few simple steps.

First, this is what the final map is going to look like:


And now I'll tell you how to do it.



This tutorial is split into 4 posts:

Post 1 - Basics, Tools of the Trade, Basic Layout, Getting Started
Post 2 - Outlines, Landmasses
Post 3 - Water bodies, Forests, Mountains
Post 4 - Glaciers, Finalizing, Aging (optional)

So, let's get it going!



BASICS
  1. Undo is your friend. Don't be afraid to experiment a bit. You cannot ruin your map by doing something "wrong". For as long as you didn't close PDN you can always hit the Undo button. You only need to remember that Undo is used globally for each picture and not on a layer base. That means that you could end up undoing a lot of stuff just to revoke a single operation on a specific layer.
  2. Layers are your best friend. I cannot repeat it enough: use layers. Use layers for everything. I use one layer for water bodies, one layer for the outlines, one layer for land masses, one layer for forests, one layer for mountains, one layer for text. Just make sure you're always checking which layer is currently selected (the one that is highlighted blue in the layer selection box) before doing something. That will save you a lot of time wondering why the heck your Blur or Render effect did nothing to the image.
  3. Save early, save often. While PDN is extremely stable (so far I haven't had it crash on me once), always make sure you have a copy of your stuff. Nothing sucks more than have 3 hours of mapping ruined by a power shortage or blue screen. This advice basically applies to everything you do at a computer, but I'm just repeating it to be on the safe side.
  4. Experiment. While you get a good result if you follow my tutorial, sometimes you can tweak some settings around to see how it works out. Don't follow my instructions blindly. Get creative.
  5. Check your settings. If something doesn't seem to work, always check the tool's settings. If a selection tool does something odd, check the Selection Mode settings or the Tolerance. If something seems to not have any effect, check if you're working on the correct layer (yes, it IS that important ), or if you try to apply a certain effect to a transparent or white area. If something doesn't show up, check if there's another layer on top of it, hiding it from your view.




TOOLS OF THE TRADE
In this tutorial I'll often referr to certain tools, effects, or actions. Here's a list with the ones I'll use and where to find them.
  • Magic Wand (Tools box)
  • Add New Layer (Layers box)
  • Ink Sketch (Effects -> Artistic menu)
  • Gaussian Blur (Effects -> Blurs menu)
  • Sharpen (Effects -> Photo menu)
  • Add Noise (Effects -> Noise menu)
  • Motion Blur (Effects -> Blurs menu)
  • Fragment (Effects -> Blurs menu)
  • Lasso Select (Tools box)
  • Paintbrush (Tools box)
  • Frosted Glass (Effects -> Distort menu)




STEP 0 - BASIC LAYOUT
For a quick and simple start on your map, get TerraJ. This Java application can create really good looking layouts and shapes quickly with the "Terrain Generator", and allows for using different projections.


Necessary for the following steps is that you check the box "Draw the edges of coastlines in black" in the Options tab.


Just play around with the settings a bit (especially the seed) until you get a layout which you like and which fits your needs. For this tutorial, I'm using a square projection map. Save the image as a .PNG file.



STEP 1 - GETTING STARTED
Load the base map you just generated into PDN.


To get rid of the black borders above and below the map, select the Magic Wand and set the Selection Mode to "Add (union)" and the Flood Mode to "Contiguous". Then click once in both black borders, hit CTRL-I to invert the selection and press the "Crop to Selection" button.

After you're done it should look like this.