Beginner's Question: I've got a world, but how do I make it look good? (GIMP)

[Iestwyn]

This is both my first foray into cartography and my first post on this forum, so please let me know if I've done anything silly.

I'm making a world for an RPG campaign, and I'm determined to do it as realistically as possible. I started with tectonics to create landmasses and mountains, then created a basic elevation map, used Geoff's Climate Cookbook to determine climate/biome groups, and combined elevation and projected relative rainfall to create rudimentary water features. I even used G Projector to convert my world map to a Robinson projection, since I'll need to have at least a bit of realistic proportions to determine travel times for my players.

You can see everything I've made here.

However, none of it looks good enough for me to feel good showing it to my players: not the caliber I see here on Cartographer's Guild. I would love to make a map with a classic fantasy feel, with the illusion of parchment and ink. I have almost no idea where to start. I've followed a few online tutorials, but I abandoned a lot of them halfway through because either they required more skill than I possess or didn't seem to be creating the feel that I'm looking for. Part of it is that I'm using GIMP, and I've never used a program like it before (not even Photoshop).

(On a slightly-related note, I tried following this tutorial for making parchment in GIMP, but GIMP keeps crashing when I try to add the bump map. Not sure what's up with that.)

I suppose what I'm asking for is any general advice for creating classical fantasy maps, or any specific resources for GIMP. If the best advice there is is just "get good," that's okay. I can keep trying.

Thank you very much for your time!

[Kellerica]

To be frank, the whole "get good" aspect does play into it quite a bit - these things do take time, and learning to use a new software efficiently definitely isn't something that happens overnight. You certainly seem to have the right attitude going in, so just keep at and I'm sure you'll get there.

Now, that being said, I think there are some things hidden around the Guild halls that maybe could help you a bit along your way. You'll have to excuse me, as I am and always have been a Photoshop user, so I don't really know anything about GIMP. But there are a number of GIMP related tutorials in this post, that might be worth looking into if you haven't already.

Now, for the parchment look in general. What I do (and I think that GIMP should have something similar to how PS handles this), is not make parchment textures myself, but use things I find online and combine them. Our member Josh Stolarz has some free textures available on his homepage, and my personal favorites have for years been these amazing pieces by CoyoteMax. There's also places like Pixabay and Textures.com, that have some nice free stuff, if you dig around a bit.

What I do with these, is laying them on top of, or beneath (oftentimes both) my maps, and have them set to layer blending modes to something like Multiply, Soft Light or Overlay, in order to get them to be transparent. I'm not a 100% sure on this, but I think GIMP should be able to do this as well? I usually combine 8-12 texture layers in one map in order to get that heavy parchment look. Experiment with different blending modes and opacity procents. Every texture combo is unique and there isn't really just one way to do this.

Not sure how helpful any of this is, but some food for thought at least.

I look forward to seeing what you'll come up with. A most warm welcome to the Guild!

[Iestwyn]

First of all, thank you so much for the welcome and support! It really means a lot.

Thanks for the links and advice. I've bookmarked all of them for study while I try a few things out.

Out of curiosity, what do you think of what I've made so far? Like I said, it's my first attempt, so I'm not sure if what I'm doing is decent.

[Kellerica]

My pleasure

And I think what you have so far looks fine, as far as I can tell. I'm afraid I'm much more of an artistic mapper than scientific, and my understanding of things like tectonic plates and ocean currents is extremely limited. And by limited, I mean practically non-existent. So I'm not really the best person to comment on that, sorry.

We have some people here, Azélor for instance, who I think has more of scientific approach to their worldbuilding and could perhaps help you out more with that.

[Iestwyn]

Fair enough. Thanks again for the help!

[Tiana]

The only geography tip I have is that mountain ranges do extend into the water, so you're likely to see island chains where mountain tops are peaking out from the water, there are a few places where I figure there'd be some islands breaking off, though you have some in the places I expect too.

Sure, it's not pretty yet but it is just a matter of 'make it pretty'. Just like Kell, I too stack several textures using a variety of layer blend modes, usually overlay, soft light, hard light, screen, multiply, but I've even found uses for difference and hue and saturation blends, just fool around with making a sandwich and once you have a good stack, merge it all and save it separately if you know you'll want to reuse that texture. I've been using dierat and hibbary's textures from DeviantArt for years, as well as multiple purchased packs of watercolor bases.

So I'm just going to literally demo with one of yours (the flat one) how to 'make it pretty'. This took me about 5 minutes to bring it to this stage.



Step 1: selected all the water and changed its color by making a new layer and filling it.
Step 2: added a unifying color tint via a 'color' or 'hue' layer to preserve the underlying map.
Step 3: I added 3 textures. Two of them are set to overlay, and one of them is set to multiply. I selected the 'water' by using that mask I made in step one and deleted it from the multiply layer.
Step 5: I made a new layer and stroked the selection with a 2 pixel line. I then contracted that selection and did another stroke. For a full blown map, I might do this several times if I used an image editing program, though I now use Other World Mapper for this step which automatically generates the shore outline.
Step 6: I duplicated the outline layer and ran gaussian blur over top of it.

The following aspects of map creation involve a TON of drawing little details or positioning stamps, but the whole 'make it pretty' is generally just a bit of experimentation with texture sandwiching to get a unique look. I have hundreds of textures stored, so it's never a problem for me to get something to work with.

Oh yeah, don't forget that you can use a fuzzy eraser to remove sections of texture that you don't want, as well as the clone tool to spread a smaller texture over a wider area. This is how you're going to get vignettes or burnt and torn edges, by using selective pieces of texture. Does that make sense? I don't always use an entire texture. I did on the quick demo I did for you, which used 3 of my stock watercolors which I adjusted to be a similar tone using that mentioned 'color' layer. But often I'll use bits of texture to create special effects, around edges or fancy regions. I almost always flatten the texture out after I'm satisfied with it, to reduce the size of my file, and to ensure no one knows how to reproduce it, not even me. I've lost brilliance when it's crashed before I saved, or I deleted the wrong file. It is kind of an imprecise magic. There's no magic formula for what textures will go well together, though I try to angle for one main simpler texture and then one edging texture and one-three different more complicated patterns on both the land and sea which I put together in a pleasing way with the clone tool or layer style sandwiches. On the sea especially, if I'm aiming for a blue sea I'll do some manual shading of the world beneath the water with a fuzzy dark blue brush and a highlight layer. Rarely on parchment though.

The textures linked above are a good start. Mouse has a few nice ones (here on the guild) I've used a few times. I haven't used Josh's but a clever thing about his is that he's requiring you to join his newsletter to get them, that's an excellent sales tactic to get an email list of potential clients. They look nice though, same with CoyoteMax's. KMAlexander has a good brush collection. I've used those a handful of times. Actually, I have some textures on DeviantArt too, calthyechild is the username, they're not specifically for maps but they're all freebies. The site's not loading for me right now so I can't dig up direct links. Textures.com and PHere, pexels, and Pixabay have all served me well in the past, though to be honest, the textures I use the most are a few packs of watercolor textures I purchased through a stock art sale for a very modest price, I got thousands of assets in a huge download set for something like $35 and while it's mostly just the watercolors that I use, there was a freakin' ton of assets in that package. Not necessarily a bad idea if you want something you're not finding among free sets. Textures.com does have a daily download limit for freebies but you can get a lot of great stock from it if you visit regularly and get those few freebies or I guess pay but I never have had to from them. I think their 3D textures are pay only, so if I got into modelling I might nab a few.

Anyway, once you've styled your coastline with the outline expand outline expand technique, you'll either do your text, or your mountains, or your trees next. Maybe cities if that was the most important thing about your map. If the most important thing is that it communicates the names, do the text first and position your art around the text. If it's more of an immersive world piece, start with your favorite world item, mountains or trees, and start planning that out and just make sure to put a stroke around your text if it ends up covering artwork. I always work mountains to hills to trees (and sometimes I'll just sort of do the outline of where the trees will be at this point) then cities/towns, and then fill in the trees afterwards if there are cities close to the trees. I usually go around the map in clockwise or counter-clockwise circles, depending on how I feel like, I might switch this back and forth. This keeps me from losing my mind while thinking about how much there is left to fill, since I'm focusing on that area. Of course I do zoom in and out to make sure that it looks right to me, but I try to pay attention to where I'm filling and make each part a nice little piece of art. I tend to work big to small, going with that whole jar of marbles and then fill it with sand metaphor.

Hopefully that makes sense? I know one thing that daunted me at first was "how do I handle all of these trees", something that really doesn't bother me anymore. The very first map I ever drew, I remember my hand tensing up about halfway through the forest circles and I began phoning it in, thinking, "why does anyone do this" and then I found tree brushes and was like "aha I don't have to do this" and now half the time, I draw every individual tree. D: KMA's got great trees if you wanted traditional / historical style ones, though. I have used one of his sets for trees on one map and I found it made a very nice forest look. If you want the typical fantasy map, they'd be a good choice, and there's many other brush sets too. That's probably the best choice for a beginner, but if you feel ambitious, it is very rewarding, though tedious, to draw your own forests and position trees. At a zoom like this, you might just do scallops and fill in a few 'clearings' and 'tree tops' to give the hint that it's a forest... then on the edges you do tree trunks.

As for mountains, I ragequit the last time I tried doing a height map shaded style, so I usually draw ridgelines now. Those are achieved by basically just drawing a jagged line and adding more lines to it until it looks right. It's intuitive more than an exact science. You can also use stamps, it's a time-honored tradition, but mountains most of all I usually draw these days. Still, again, there's great hills and mountains in KMA's sets, so you could always try the stamp method and see how you like it. Even if you don't, it'll give you something to draw over that's closer to that fantasy hand drawn parchment paper look you're hoping for.

A lot of the magic is "just draw it and work hard and hope for the best" but really, it's more tedious than hard. You made a decent looking base, you definitely have the skills to jazz it up just waiting for you to discover. I could work with this as the actual land base for a map rather than redrawing it and get something nice, so you can too.

[Iestwyn]

Wow, all this is excellent. This is bookmarked for study and experimentation later, since I don't have much time right now.

Thanks so very much!!

[Jeff Stormer]

This is both my first foray into cartography and my first post on this forum, so please let me know if I've done anything silly.

I'm making a world for an RPG campaign, and I'm determined to do it as realistically as possible. I started with tectonics to create landmasses and mountains, then created a basic elevation map, used Geoff's Climate Cookbook to determine climate/biome groups, and combined elevation and projected relative rainfall to create rudimentary water features. I even used G Projector to convert my world map to a Robinson projection, since I'll need to have at least a bit of realistic proportions to determine travel times for my players.

You can see everything I've made here.

However, none of it looks good enough for me to feel good showing it to my players: not the caliber I see here on Cartographer's Guild. I would love to make a map with a classic fantasy feel, with the illusion of parchment and ink. I have almost no idea where to start. I've followed a few online tutorials, but I abandoned a lot of them halfway through because either they required more skill than I possess or didn't seem to be creating the feel that I'm looking for. Part of it is that I'm using GIMP, and I've never used a program like it before (not even Photoshop).

(On a slightly-related note, I tried following this tutorial for making parchment in GIMP, but GIMP keeps crashing when I try to add the bump map. Not sure what's up with that.)

I suppose what I'm asking for is any general advice for creating classical fantasy maps, or any specific resources for GIMP. If the best advice there is is just "get good," that's okay. I can keep trying.

Thank you very much for your time!

Also my first post (joined a bit over 4 years ago), I lurk, I totally forget about this insanely wonderful resource, I binge.

I am quite a bit behind you in terms of mapping skills. However, I have discovered a couple of resources you might find helpful in your fantasy map making, especially with the GIMP.

Both are Youtube channels.

The first deals directly with the GIMP. It's "The Coffee Bean GM" and his series "Gimp Mapping Made Easy." He goes with a more artistic approach rather than the more scientific approach, but the use of the tools is the important thing.

The second channel is Artefexian. He's got 2 major...play lists...for a lack of a better term. One is Conlanging. The other is Fantasy Cartography from a very solid science base, from creating the star, then the world, moons, tectonics, wind/water movements, weather, ...the whole shebang. Insanely detailed--and frequently with a bucketload of free spreadsheets and similar tools to help crunch your specific numbers for your specific world.

I have found them hugely helpful---but be warned! The rabbit hole is *deep*!

[Iestwyn]

Oh, I love Artifexian! I used a bunch of his stuff in my maps.

I haven't heard of The Coffee Bean GM. I'll have to check him out; thanks!

[alfredftw]

I kinda of want to reverse of this post, Iestwyn did you generate your base maps using online tools? Or did you actually learn tectonic science and weather patterns to figure all that out?