9. Our layers palette is getting quite long so let’s fix that. Click on the “land” layer. At the bottom of the layers palette you will see an icon that looks like a little folder…click that. This inserts a folder into our layers palette and you can name it whatever you like…I named mine “main map”. Drag each of the layers that are below this folder onto the folder name itself (you will see a brown glow around the name of the folder). Once done, click on the little triangle to the left to collapse the view. Click on the topmost country layer and repeat this process. You should have 4 layers above that are not in folders; rivers, mountains, aging, and brown.
10. Let’s add some cities now. Change back to the pencil and grab the Hard round 5-pixels tip. Click on the “mountains” layer and create a new layer, rename it to “cities”. Put a dot wherever you want it. On the layers palette, right click on this layer and choose “Paste layer style” (this puts that 1-pixel black stroke around the dot and makes the dot itself invisible). Since this is supposed to be something more modern we will need lots of cities and towns…we do not need to make this a sparsely settled map like we would for something medieval. Also, what makes this style map seem nice is the sheer amount of text on it, but I’ll get to that later…for now put in lots of dots. We will only name cities and towns so don’t worry about that too much…yet. I put dots at every river delta, wherever two rivers meet, and then wherever seems kind of empty ((pic antique 16)).
11. Now the ultra tedious part…naming all of that stuff. Cities and towns use Times New Roman but the towns are italicized. Set the font size to 4pt for cities and 3.5pt for towns. As a rule of thumb I use 2 towns to 1 city. Once you have all of the cities and towns named merge them all together and rename this layer to “city names”. Change the layer’s opacity to 75% and add a layer style of outer glow...the color is F5F5F0 (rgb 245, 245, 240), mode is screen, opacity is 75%, spread and size are both 10. What really makes this style of map cool is the sheer amount of text you can cram into it and still be relatively legible. So, although it is tedious, try to name as many things as you can, I have not since this is just a tutorial ((pic antique 17)).
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