Just for fun and to see how it would go, i decided that I wanted to try and make some full size battle maps using brushed india ink and bond paper.



I made this map to accompany an adventure I wrote for my friends to play in D&D 4e.


The only digital elements were the cutting and pasting to cobble the scan together into one image. It was on an 18" by 24" sheet of paper so i scanned eight sections to fit the whole thing into one.

For making the grid I used a tool called a pounce wheel (which looks like a tiny wheeled spur) to cut a grid of holes into a large sheet of mylar. I laid the mylar over the blank sheet of paper so the holes lined up to form a grid and then sponged/brushed the back of the mylar so that ink would flow through the holes down onto the paper forming a sloppy grid.

After the ink was dry I free handed he dungeon features in with pencil to get the placement right and then inked the whole thing in various shades of black ink.

I wasn't trying to be too careful since it was more of a proof of concept thing so it's a little wonky but it's great when I pulled out an actual hand painted map to play on. It took about two hours working on the pre-gridded paper.

In the future I would go with heavier watercolor paper because the bond paper was too thin for the water I was splashing on. The grid of mylar is like a primitive silkscreen and is just kind of a hassle for what you get. I think next time I would just grid it off with a T-square and pencil and add small brush lines in by hand later.

(thanks, and I hope this post is proper for the final works section.)