For the city map, I studied this one primarily: Aerius's City Map
For the world map, I used ideas from This one by Wag mostly.
So, maybe you can now see why I say mine are cheap imitations.
As for a tutorial...that would be one long tutorial! There are many steps I did. I can answer questions, tell you how I did a specific thing.
I hand drew a great deal more on the city one than I normally care to. Almost all the buildings were hand drawn with a pencil brush using layer effects to put color and the outline around them. Once all the buildings were drawn, I created a wash of various colors using clouds and a soft brush set to vary the hue and color some and painted over areas. Then I selected the buildings and used that selection to mask out the color wash, leaving it to color only the buildings.
For the farm land, I used the attached texture. I made a fill layer using the texture, and then masked it out. Then I refined the mask by hand painting using a round brush and just putting in roughly square farms next to each other, trying to make thin hedge like places of texture. I added a subtle layer effect to the texture layer to help it stand out a bit, a dark outer glow I think. Once I masked out the texture, I made a new layer to color it. I set it to 22% opacity and just painted bright colors over the 'crops' with a soft brush. I also put another texture/pattern I made under it for more color and variety. I'll attach that too. I think I took that patchwork texture and applied an effect to it to make it look more like a watercolor painting, but I can't remember specifics.
For the terrain shading I took a screen capture of google maps set to the topography setting and pasted that in as my base layer. I then rotated and edited it some to make it more of what I wanted. I panted more ridges and such here and there. I took out the elevation lines, city roads, labels, color and all that. I then applied many filters until it looked like what I wanted. I can't really remember what filters I used. Then, I just piled the various layer effects and textures on top of this foundation.
I'll also attach the pattern I used to make a brush to make some of the buildings after I got tired of hand drawing them all.
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