How to draw a map. This tutorial covers my entire process for how to draw a map  from start to finish. In this case Im illustrating a simple town map, but the steps apply to any map. Tools and Software. I used Photoshop for this map, but all of this can be done in Gimp for free. I also use a graphics tablet. Tablets are great for this work, and if youre thinking about digital map making Id recommend picking one up. Draw Program FreeRecursive Drawing is an exploration of user interface ideas towards the development of a spatiallyoriented programming environment. See why SmartDraw is the smartest way to draw any type of chart, diagram flowcharts, org charts, floor plans, network diagrams, and more. Free templatesThis tutorial covers my entire process for how to draw a map from start to finish. Here Im illustrating a town map, but the steps apply to any map. 10,000 sheep drawn by workers on Amazons Mechanical Turk. I use a Wacom Intuous, but I started on a Wacom Bamboo much cheaper and almost all the same functionality. You can also follow along using pen and paper, a scanner and a mouse. Ive uploaded the full photoshop file if you want to look at the final file and see how the sausage was made. The full size final map is here. Feel free to use it for personal use. Outline of how to draw a map. My steps in drawing a map are pretty consistent sketch an outlineink in the outlinesadd detail linesblock in dark areasadd overall light and shadelay in base coloursadd detailed light and shadelabelfinal polish border, colour balancing, tone balancing. Ill go through each of these steps in order. Setup. To begin, lets open a new document. Here Ive started with a small document as this is purely digital. Its 1. 20. 0 pixels by 9. I trimmed it down at the end. Thats large enough to fill most computer screens. If this was for print, Id create a document 3. This is because print requires a resolution of 3. So for print, you need to up the resolution by 3x. I grabbed one of my parchment textures and set it as the background. This is one I built myself, but there are a bunch of old paper textures out there to use.  CGTextures has a ton of old paper textures. So far, so unexciting, but this is a solid base to start from. Sketch the base for your map. The first step in any map is to create a sketch. This is when the core design work is done. This step can take days, or can be a quick process of laying down an idea you already have fully formed. Here I want to lay out a town, some forest, and a cliff. Designing a town can be a complicated process I wrote up a full tutorial on how to design a town map so I wont go into that process here. For the sketch, create a new layer and use a hard round brush. I use a 5px round brush with the size set to pressure sensitive. I quickly block in the large outlines of the forest, a line for the cliff, and the roads to define the town. At this stage you want to see whether the map makes sense. Tux Paint is a free, awardwinning drawing program for children ages 3 to 12 for example, preschool and K6. Tux Paint is used in schools around the world as a. PBS and NPR for San Diego, California. Get the latest news, listen online, watch the latest episodes, check our schedules, become a member. KPBS Where News Matters. Autodesk SketchBook is the awardwinning drawing app from the leader in computeraided design. Its made for creative professionals, aspiring artists, and. The draw against commission compensation program also a guarantee is paid with every check, and when the commissionable event occurs, payments are. The Big Draw is the worlds biggest drawing festival from The Campaign for Drawing. Find or arrange your own drawing events, exhibitions or workshops. We believe. Whether youre looking to learn a new instrument or improve your photography skills, eHow Art will help you learn new abilities sans classroom. Does it fit the page Are you cramping the detail in some regions If its a battlemap how would it play in a combat If its a town map are there sources of food, water, trade, and defence These questions mean that the bones of the map make sense, and ensure the final map will hang together. Its easier to change it now before we start adding detail. Ink the Outlines. Once you have the general design in place its time to lay in the detailed lines. Start by creating a new layer, and dropping the sketch layer back to 3. If youre using pencil, pen and paper, now is the time to move to pen. These lines will define the outlines of the major features of the map. Start by prioritising those elements that define the edge of a large feature coastlines, the edge of a forest, a river, roads, cliffs. These are the most important details of the map they are the information. Here Ive used the style of line to sell the feature it represents. The edge of the forest is almost like the edge of a cauliflower, or a childs drawing of a cloud. Lots of small curves joined together to make larger curved shapes. Dont worry about making the edge completely contiguous it can be messy. For the cliff, what you really see is all the edges, all the way down. Each edge is a ledge on the cliff, and because of the sharp drop, those lines are bunched close together. Where the lines are further apart, the eye naturally reads that as a smoother descent. So weve illustrated our cliff, and conveyed useful information about the relevant steepness at different portions of the cliff. For more on how to draw cliffs in different styles, check out this tutorial. For the buildings, Ive kept it really simple. Drawing building at a larger scale can take a while, and there are lots of tricks and tips for laying in large amounts of buildings quickly. In this Ive used a simple collection of straight lines, elbows, and circles, to give some variety. Ive placed some larger structures near the center, and followed the roads. Theres an unusually shaped structure off in the woods on the left which will be a tower, and Ive decided to place two flanking structures around the roads to the south west and east. The town doesnt have a wall, but it can have a couple of roadside lookout towers for defence. Note at this time we have a serviceable map. Everything from this point on barring the labeling is to make it pretty. Add the Detail Lines. Outlines are only the start of the story we need to add some detail. As before, create a new layer. Were still using a 5px hard round brush with size set to pressure sensitivity. The detailed lines help sell the map. Some people make the mistake of skipping this stage. Detail here is actually pretty quick, and it makes life so much easier down the road. Lines are a very efficient way of conveying detail. For the forest I use short curved dashes. I follow the edges of the forest, except when the outline comes into the bulk of the forest. In those notches into the outline, I bring the details into the middle of the forest. This allows me to define the bulk forms of the forest within the outline. You can see the forms of clumps of trees that break up the mass of the forest. However, note that I dont draw individual trees anywhere except when theres a couple of trees out there on their own. The cliff is already detailed, so I leave that alone. However I decided that the town needs a river. After all, people need to drink and the cliff looks like it may have been carved by a river. So I add a new layer, draw a river outline, and move the relevant buildings out of the way. For the road, I keep the same brush, create a new layer, and set the blend mode to overlay and the opacity to 3. Then I draw in the smooth lines of the road. This keeps it separate from the lines, but very clear and easy to read. If you want a fancier version of roads with clean outlines, theres a slightly longer method here. If youre using pen and paper for this, now is the time to erase your pencil lines. Its actually pretty easy to turn your pen and ink map into an aged paper map like the one above and the rest of this tutorial can be completed with a mouse. Heres a run down on how to turn your paper map into digital line art. Thatll get you to the right place to take on the next steps. Block in the Bulk Shadows. Not all elements of a map live in the same tonal range. By this I mean that the light parts of a tree are darker than the light parts on a patch of grass. The deep shadows of a forest are darker than the shadows on a road. So, to begin with, we block in the overall tone range of our map. Make the darker areas dark, and if there are particularly light areas, lighten them up. For this create a new layer and set the blend mode to overlay. I then pick a hard round brush with size set to around 2. This means that if I press lightly, I get an almost transparent line, if I press hard, I get a deep opaque black. Oh, and set the brush colour to black. I then work into the forest with an almost opaque black.