Thread: [Award Winner] Old School Blue in Illustrator

SYMBOLS

detach your symbol box for easy access. Its good to zoom in to about two grid boxes. (shortcut: SPACEBAR + CTRL to zoom in quickly, SPACEBAR + CTRL + ALT to zoom out quickly)

Now start creating the symbols you will need for the map. Its fairly simple process, so I don't feel much of a need to go into each one step by step. Just go from Grid square to square and put out a symbol in each one.

For doors, use a box with a white fill, to cover any lines you put them over.

For your rubble, use the pencil tool with a blue fill and no select. This allows you to quickly draw rubble in. (pencil too: hold down ALT after you started your line, before you end your line and pick up your stylus, this will auto connect the lines.)


Once you have completed all the symbols you think you will need, take your selection tool and grab each one, dragging it to the symbol box and naming each one (if you desire) and you are done with this layer, lock it and hide it and move on to the next layer
.

Grab you pen tool, for a standard no frills dungeon, you can leave the grid snap on. Make your line 1 point... and start mapping your walls. If you don't want your walls to stand out as they do on some old maps, you can skip this step and just block in all the solid parts and then come back and put walls in where they need to go. If you want your walls to appear darker than the fill then this step is where you make the difference.

Be sure you put your symbols on a seperate layer than your walls so you can quick select the entire layer and change the color of the walls to suit. Once the walls are done, then on to placing symbols. I found it best to have the grid snap turned off when placing your symbols.

Then, on another seperate layer (drop this one below your wall layer if you plan on having two different blues for walls and fill). Take your pen tool, fill with your (by now a very irritating blue) set your line to none, and block in all the areas that need to be solid blue.

After that its some numbers, a legend and some labels if you desire and VIOLA you have yourself an old school blue map.... amaze your friends, enjoy the envy of your peers, and now your maps can never, ever be photocopied again! ....

and the symbols I made for this map blue.zip

Love seeing oldschool blue. Duly Repped!

Originally Posted by delgondahntelius

Why not? An old school blue map in AI.

Amen; that's how I do all my old-school dungeon layouts, too. Nice work on this tutorial.

May I suggest, if you are planning on printing your map that you work in CMYK mode. RGB is only good for display on computer screens. Of course if you don't plan on printing, then RGB would be appropriate.

-Rob

Originally Posted by NeonKnight

Love seeing oldschool blue. Duly Repped!

Thanx NK Knew an Oldschooler like you would like it ;D

Originally Posted by Ghalev

Amen; that's how I do all my old-school dungeon layouts, too. Nice work on this tutorial.

It was actually the first one I've done (both tutorial and blue map), but that is the way I plan to do them in the future

Originally Posted by HandsomeRob

May I suggest, if you are planning on printing your map that you work in CMYK mode. RGB is only good for display on computer screens. Of course if you don't plan on printing, then RGB would be appropriate.

-Rob

Good call HR, meant to say something about it and totally forgot. I'll update the post to include CMYK remarks... This is actually the first RGB file i've done in AI for such a long time it was kinda eerie ....

RGB is only good for display on computer screens

That's generally true, but the majority of printers, both hi-end and low-end, have fully automatic RGB-> CMYK filters and don't blink at RGB. The hue shifts, saturation, gamut concerns, rich black etc. generally don't matter unless you are a professional printer concerned with color matching (and even then, *ahem*).

I wonder WHY they chose that blue. Were they hoping for a "non-repro" effect? Anybody remember those days?

... /end OT.

Originally Posted by töff

I wonder WHY they chose that blue. Were they hoping for a "non-repro" effect?

Yeah. TSR did a number of different anti-photocopying schemes over the years: blue dungeons, brown-orange character sheets, red-screened character sheets, etc.

And, of course, all those dungeons were designed and drafted in black; the blue was a spot ink.

I really like the old blue dungeons! Repped and rated!