[Award Winner] Old School Blue in Illustrator

[Badger]

SYMBOLS

detach your symbol box for easy access. Its good to zoom in to about two grid boxes. (shortcut: SPACEBAR + CTRL to zoom in quickly, SPACEBAR + CTRL + ALT to zoom out quickly)

Now start creating the symbols you will need for the map. Its fairly simple process, so I don't feel much of a need to go into each one step by step. Just go from Grid square to square and put out a symbol in each one.

For doors, use a box with a white fill, to cover any lines you put them over.

For your rubble, use the pencil tool with a blue fill and no select. This allows you to quickly draw rubble in. (pencil too: hold down ALT after you started your line, before you end your line and pick up your stylus, this will auto connect the lines.)


Once you have completed all the symbols you think you will need, take your selection tool and grab each one, dragging it to the symbol box and naming each one (if you desire) and you are done with this layer, lock it and hide it and move on to the next layer
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[Badger]

Grab you pen tool, for a standard no frills dungeon, you can leave the grid snap on. Make your line 1 point... and start mapping your walls. If you don't want your walls to stand out as they do on some old maps, you can skip this step and just block in all the solid parts and then come back and put walls in where they need to go. If you want your walls to appear darker than the fill then this step is where you make the difference.

Be sure you put your symbols on a seperate layer than your walls so you can quick select the entire layer and change the color of the walls to suit. Once the walls are done, then on to placing symbols. I found it best to have the grid snap turned off when placing your symbols.

Then, on another seperate layer (drop this one below your wall layer if you plan on having two different blues for walls and fill). Take your pen tool, fill with your (by now a very irritating blue) set your line to none, and block in all the areas that need to be solid blue.

After that its some numbers, a legend and some labels if you desire and VIOLA you have yourself an old school blue map.... amaze your friends, enjoy the envy of your peers, and now your maps can never, ever be photocopied again! ....

and the symbols I made for this map blue.zip

[NeonKnight]

Love seeing oldschool blue. Duly Repped!