Creating a tutorial. Need your input.

[Wired]

This is really helpful, Wired. Your forests look great.

Keep 'em coming!

Absolutely loving this tutorial. Looks awesome.

Interesting tutorial Wired, quite inspirational!

Thank you, everybody. I'll, of course, go over all steps once again I'm done with the tutorial. Then I'll add the refined version to the tutorial section.

[Ptakub]

Are you going to give some tips on drawing ridgelines and all these cool, rough mountain ranges at some point? It would be really cool : ]

Tutorial is cool, there are some very valuable lessons here.

[Wired]

Are you going to give some tips on drawing ridgelines and all these cool, rough mountain ranges at some point? It would be really cool : ]

Probably not in this tutorial. I chose these simple mountains to avoid that point alltogether so as to not make this too complicated.

Tutorial is cool, there are some very valuable lessons here.

Thank you, I'm glad it's of use to you.

[Wired]

Part 5: Grass, ... , and Locations

No contour lines. :-/

Alright, where did we leave off? Ah, yes: locations. Before we move on to the small details, create a new layer (no need to name it, you can delete it later anyway) and mark the spots where you want to place some of your locations like towns or villages. Like this:



You can, of course, place on the map whatever you want, as long as it's thematically fitting.

Now, here's the part where the tutorial will get extremely unprecise. I tend to draw all my locations by hand nowadays, or adapt existing brushes into locations that fit my wishes. If you don't think you can draw them yourselves, don't worry. There's no need for picturesque location symbols. You can just as well go with simple geographic shapes, or simple, flat 2D depictions of whatever you want. Keep in mind that, if you want them to be crisp and clear, you'll have to switch to a simple Hard Round Brush, size 1px or 2px.

What I've done is to create a new layer for each location (!!!!!), then used the above mentioned brush to draw short, connected lines adding up to houses and buildings. I don't know how to describe this any better, but it's about the level of artistic ability we all had back in kindergarden. :p

Just think about what you want to show, and what the best/easiest way to achieve that is: a town? Draw a simple wall, add some stacked roofs behind it, add some chimneys and some rising smoke with a soft brush. A village? Draw a few box-shaped houses that seem to overlap each other. And then, need more villages? Simply duplicate the layer (rightclick on the layer in the layer menu), and horizontally mirror it if you want some variety (go to Edit-->Transform-->Flip Horizontally). A bridge? Four short vertical lines connected by two bow-shaped lines. These things are ultimately rather easy, if you don't pay too much attention to perspective and detail, and in a beginners' map you certainly shouldn't have to!

Now my map looks like this. There are villages, a walled town, a tavern, a pathway through the swamp, old mines, a ruined castle and a lighthouse.



Now we're going to connect these locations, and to do so we'll build ourselves a nice little brush.

Building a "Road" brush
Sounds complicated, but is really, really easy.
Here's what you need to do:
Go to File-->New. Create a new file sized 100x100px. Yes, that small.
Add a new layer and hide the background layer by double-clicking on it and either deleting or making it invisible in the layer options.
Grab the Hard Round Brush and draw two dots of 5px size next to each other in the horizontal plane.
Go to Image-->Trim-->Ok.
Go to Edit-->Define Brush Preset-->Ok.
Switch back to your tutorial map. The new brush should be the last in your list of brush presets.
Select the Brush Tool and pick the newly created brush in the brush presets.
Toggle the brush panel (you do this via the symbols of three paint brushes right next to brush size slide).
Go to shape dynamics, and under angle jitter select direction.
Draw your roads!



Now we'll add some simple snow to the high north.
Create a new layer called Snow and pick our trusty hard round pressure size brush at 2px. Now simply draw some wave-like lines with low pressure and you get frosty plains covered by windblown snow!



Last, but not least, grass!



Now simply apply this brush where you want your grass to be and delete the tufts that are too much! Easy as that!



Et voila!

Next time: Part 6: Labels, Map Borders and a Compass Rose