Create all those little buildings on a city map

[aaronil]

I would definitely encourage doing hand-drawn instead of CC3, you have more freedom hand drawn and in my opinion can produce better works, and it is completely original.

There are other techniques for drawing buildings, little tips and tricks for shortcuts if there are A LOT of buildings.

Check out this thread:https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...t=capital+city
And these tutorials from Fantastic Maps: http://www.fantasticmaps.com/2013/03...namic-brushes/
http://www.fantasticmaps.com/2013/03...o-draw-houses/

Of course you could always draw them by hand (especially if it's a smaller city), if you stick with it it gets done pretty quickly.

Thanks for the Jon Roberts' links. That dynamic brushes jitter trick (2nd link) is pretty cool. He always has great tips.

Looking back at Warhammer Praag map I posted in the OP, I'm pretty sure the artist used hand-drawn buildings but grouped them into clusters which were copied, pasted, rotated/resized, etc. Like with building, the real trick is in the connections –– like how did the artist get the transition between copy-pasted building clusters looking so smooth?

Your map looks great by the way! If you're already an artist you'll excel at cartography I think. A number of cartographer's on here are actually also illustrators.

That's very kind. To be honest, I see several flaws in my map (e.g. the topography) and I feel it demonstrates just a minimum competency in Photoshop (layers, layer styles, drop shadows, cool brushes found online, curving text along a path, coloring techniques, and the grow command to create river outline). But I guess I've got to start somewhere.