[Award Winner] A Hand-drawn Primer

[Ascension]

This tutorial comes about after many failed attempts at getting this style correct...some might say it's still not correct At any rate this is sort of an "Introduction to Hand-drawn Style Maps". I did this in about an hour but that's only because I am familiar with doing it. If you've never done this before it will probably take a little longer. The image is the final map.

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So let's get started with something small and simple. 1000 x 1000 at 100 ppi, white background, RGB, and 8 bits.

1. Create a new layer. Grab the Brush tool and choose the 5 pixel soft round tip. Make sure that it is at 100% opacity and flow and it's mode is normal. Draw some squiggly coastlines and islands. Doesn't have to be fancy, doesn't have to be done with a tablet (but it looks cooler if you do because you can get different lines widths). I always try to put a few islands at the end of any piece of land that sticks out and then a few random ones in various areas. Just so you know, I'm intending the space on the right to be the ocean and that on the left as land...otherwise my little islands would be lakes. Make sure that all islands are fully closed (no open spaces) and make sure that the coastline goes all the way to the edge. See Pic 1.

2. Put in some rivers. They don't have to be perfect and you can change them later, after the mountains are in, if you don't like where they are now. See Pic 2.

3. Put in some lakes and make sure that they are connected to a river. See Pic 3.

4. For the mountains I use a roughly triangular shape with lots of wiggles in it. Put the highest, pointiest peaks in the middle and then round them off as you get further out. See Pic 4.

5. Put a squiggle down the middle on the peaks. This will serve to show us which side is facing the light and which side is in shadow. See Pic 5.

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6. Create a new layer and set the opacity of this layer at 40%. Still using the same brush sketch in some lines - more lines on the shadow side. These lines will define the slopes so make sure that they don't all go the same way. See Pic 6.

7. Create a new layer and set it's opacity at 40%. Do the same thing as in step six but start your lines lower. See Pic 7.

8. Create a new layer and set it's opacity at 40%. Do the same thing as in step seven but start your lines even lower. See Pic 8.

9. Go back on the various layers and brush in some more lines until the valleys are filled in nice and dark. See Pic 9.

10. On the top layer of this shading go to Filter - Blur - Gaussian Blur = 2. On the middle layer blur it 1 and on the bottom layer blur it .5. See Pic 10.

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11. Create a new layer. Here we are going to start our forests. Draw something "foresty" - roughly rounded but with lots of little bumps around the edge. Try to keep the shapes away from rivers and mountains. Also make sure that the shapes are fully closed...no open spaces. See Pic 11.

12. Grab the Magic Wand tool and click on the area outside of the forest. Select - Modify - Expand = 2. Select - Inverse. Create a new layer. Grab the Paint Bucket tool and fill then deselect (ctrl + d). Move this layer below the tree outlines. See Pic 12.

13. Apply your favorite layer style of Pattern Overlay. I like Gauche at 400% Also give it an Inner Shadow but make sure that the shadow comes from the opposite direction of your light source....here my light source is at 120 so my shadow is at -60. If your pattern is too dark then put a Color Overlay of white on it as well and mess around with the blend mode and opacity until you get something in a medium to light gray. See Pic 13.

14. Click back on the tree outline layer. This part is probably the hardest part to get right but once you do it will be like riding a bike. Just draw a bunch of little arc shapes around the inner edge. With that done go back and fill with more little arc shapes to create some roughly rounded shapes...I use my pattern on the layer below to guide me. See Pic 14.

15. Create a new layer and set the opacity at 20%. We now change to the 20 pixel soft round brush tip. I brush in some shadows with black and some highlights with white on this layer. See Pic 15.

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16. Duplicate the layer that has the tree pattern and inner shadow on it. Remove the inner shadow. Change the pattern to a black and clear vertical stripes pattern. If you do not have a pattern like that then here's how to make one: Create a new image 4 pixels wide by 1 pixel high with a clear background; grab the Pencil tool and the 1 pixel hard round brush tip; zoom in to 1600% and place two dots on one side of the image and leave the other two dots clear; edit - Define Pattern. Back on our layer set the Fill of the layer to zero. Create a new layer and move it below our lines layer. Link them together. Click back on the lines layer. Hit ctrl + e to merge them together and thus removing the layer style in favor of a layer that we can edit. Click on the Move tool and on the keyboard hit the Down Arrow 10 times. Filter - Blur - Guassin Blur = .5. Move this layer below our tree pattern layer. See Pic 16.

17. Put in some basic towns by first drawing out some horizontal lines. It doesn't matter where they are or how close together they are. Turn these lines into rectangles and then put triangles on top of them and now you have some small huts. Grab the Brush tool again and put in some smoke coming out of the roofs. The important thing here is to make the lines on the right side of the huts thicker to make it look like they are in shadow. See Pic 17.

18. Create a new layer and move it below the hut outlines. Use the brush tool to color in the shapes and then set the opacity of the layer to 50% You can go lower if you want. See Pic 18.

19. Click back on the very first layer that we drew that has the continent outline and mountains on it. It should be named Layer 1 unless you changed that. Grab the Magic Wand again and click in the ocean. Select - Modify - Expand = 2. Create a new layer and fill it with black. Set the opacity of the layer at 20%. See Pic 19.

20. This step is the longest. On the layer stack, hold down the ctrl key then click on this layer to load it as a selection. Select - Inverse. Select - Modify - Expand = 20. Select - Feather = 20. Create a new layer and fill it with black then deselect. Set the Fill of the layer at 0. Apply a layer style of Pattern Overlay using a pattern of black and clear horizontal stripes (if you don't have one like this then do the part in step 16 but make the image 1 pixel wide and 4 pixels high). Create a new layer and move it under this layer then link them together and click back on the above layer. Hit ctrl + e to merge them. Filter - Distort - Ripple = Medium at 100. Filter - Stylize - Wind = wind, from right. Repeat the wind but from the left. See Pic 20.

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21. Duplicate the Background layer and apply your favorite Pattern Overlay, again I went with Gauche at 400% but I added a white Color Overlay at 60%. See Pic 21.

22. Create a new layer and move it to the top of the layer stack. Fill it with any color you like and set the Blend Mode to Color. See Pic 22.

23. Click back on Layer 1. Grab the Magic Wand again and click in the sea. Select - Modify - Contract = 20. Select - Feather = 20. Select - Inverse. Create a new layer and fill it with black. Click on Layer 1 and grab the Magic Wand again and click in the sea. Select - Modify - Expand = 2. Click on the above layer. Select - Inverse. Select - Modify - Contract = 20. Select - Feather = 20. Hit the delete key and then deselect. This puts a dark ring around the inside of our land as well as the outside. I also used a 100 pixel soft round airbrush tip to brush in some dark spots in the corners. See Pic 23.

24. Add names for places in your favorite font. See Pic 24.

25. Create a new layer and move it to the top of the layer stack. Grab the Paint Bucket tool and fill it with white. Switch over to black and grab a Pencil and make squiggly lines around the edge. Fill the area in with black. This is going to be the edges of our paper so put some rips and cracks on it and have fun. See Pic 25.

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26. Filter - Blur - Gaussian Blur = .5. You can use something different depending on what your paper shape looks like. Make sure that black is the foreground color then Select - Color Range = black with a fuzziness of 200. Select - Inverse. Hit the delete key then deselect. This leaves only the black so now add a layer style of Outer Glow. Use black with a blend mode of Color Burn. Set the size and other parameters to whatever makes you happy. Mine has an opacity of 50%, the size is 81 and the spread is 10. See Pic 26.

27. Create a new layer and move it below the color layer. On this layer put your favorite paper folds. I used one of CoyoteMax's but since it was already colored I had to Image - Adjustments - Desaturate to make it grayscale. I also set the blend mode to hard light. I went and added a drop shadow to the forest pattern layer and put one underneath of the land. See Pic 27.

28. Create a new layer and put it at the top of the layer stack. On this layer put your favorite grunge and blood spatters. See Pic 28.


This is the end. I hope you learned some things and I hope that I was clear enough for you to follow along. As with all of my tuts, you are free to experiment and make changes until you get a result that makes you happy...this is just an Intro class. Putting this thread together took me twice as long as drawing the map in the first place. So once you get used to doing this you can whip these things out really fast.

~A~

Edit: went back and fixed typos and an omitted step...it is now done.

[torstan]

Nice result. I'll have to follow it through with a little more time, but this looks great.

[ravells]

Looks fab, Ascension! Thanks for posting this!

[Steel General]

Great stuff here Ascension...