Mapmaker, mapmaker make me a map!

With apologies to Fiddler on the Roof. When I was a kid, we did something with that song in my grade school music class, and I guess it's been stuck in my psyche ever since. Even though the only time I've ever seen Fiddler on the Roof was when my sister-in-law had a part in it in her high school play rendition.

As I'm working on making a map for my latest revision of the DH5 setting, which does require a new map (honestly, I never really made a very good one for the pre-revision version of the setting anyway) I've been concerned with two things in about equal measure, even though they probably aren't equal in actual importance. The first is, how to actually structure my new map? Although I've previously drawn maps for both Timischburg and the Hill Country, and my "Daemon Wastes" or whatever exactly I end up calling it (yet another issue I need to resolve) is loosely based on my older Baal Hamazi material, none of them will be very easily adapted into the new map. It'll just be elements picked up and lifted into a whole new arrangement. For that matter, trying to squeeze all three of them into one map is a bit daunting. I'm not 100% sure that it'll work, although I've got the possible idea of doing two different maps; one a traditional, hand-drawn, black and white one, that like Christopher Tolkien's famous Middle-earth map is fairly high level, and doesn't attempt to show "everything"; meaning that if I have features that I already know of that I don't put on the map, it's not going to ruin it for me, because it's not meant to show all of the villages, paths, and county divisions, etc. that I've already come up with for various reasons.  The second map would be a hand-drawn and digitized hybrid; I'd hand draw most of the features, possibly on a larger sheet of paper (an 11 x 14 sketch pad, I'm thinking—although not in my house, I do have relatively easy access to an 11 x 17 scanner to digitize it.). This would be drawn features only; no labels, and I'd then maybe color it and certainly label it with software; GIMP, or paint.net or pixlr or some such. Because of it's larger size and resolution, I could add considerably more details to this map, if I wasn't able to fit them on the previously drawn one. But still, the first task is just figuring out exactly how to rearrange it anyway. For example, I had originally made Timischburg a stretch of land with a coast along the southern edge. Although I never redrew it, by attaching it to the same setting as the Hill Country, it was going to be flipped so that that southern coastline was on the east and everything was 90º from where it was. I'm now thinking it's much more likely that the coastline will be at about a 45º degree diagonal on the southwest edge of the map. Rather than simply continuing to rotate the country around, I'll probably redesign it to be congruent with this orientation from the get-go. And rather that simply have the two regions tacked on next to each other (now three regions) I'm thinking of more tightly splicing them together with features that kind of cross over the boundaries a bit rather than simply being cut and paste straight edges between each segment. The whole arrangement has yet to be decided. It shouldn't be hard to do, but for some reason, I find myself slightly psychologically daunted by doing it, so I haven't gotten around to it yet. Plus, I'm trying to decide if I want to document my process and maybe create a youtube video of me whipping up a draft on scratch paper, or if I just want to do it and not document it. If I do document it, I have to figure out a few more things yet; I don't really have a set-up that's convenient for recording myself drawing. I'd have to come up with some kind of tripod or armature for my camera, and probably go buy a new desk lamp. At the very least.

The second thing I'm working out is exactly what styles I'm going to use for the various elements of my map. While there are a fair number of youtube series on how to draw fantasy maps that showcase different styles, I don't necessarily think that they are always the best examples of the various styles, nor do they show every style that I've ever seen. Long before Youtube was a thing, I was working on my own style of fantasy map drawing, mostly by looking at lots of fantasy maps, deciding what I thought looked good, trying to imitate it, and then evaluating how well that worked, and going from there. This isn't to say that my map-making techniques have been static since I was in 8th or 9th grade and Miami Vice was still at its peak of first run showings on TV... although I can certainly say that I haven't changed a lot since then. I found my old poster board Dark•Heritage Mk. IV map earlier today, which I hadn't looked at in quite some time and it's probably been the better part of ten years since I made it. That's probably the most recent fairly serious map I've drawn, though, where I really made an effort to make it a reasonably good looking rather than super sketchy map, at a fairly large scale, and there's a few things that I'd tried on that that I don't normally do that I like, and a few that I don't as much. A few minor details and tweaks to the style will probably be called for, but I'm still working out via some tests, trials and experiments, exactly what those will be. Although I did pencil that one in and then ink over the pencils, going back with an eraser, in general I don't like doing that; I like sketching a draft on one sheet, and then simply redrawing it in ink on a blank sheet of paper. The draft doesn't have to necessarily be in pencil either; in fact, if I do decide to record my draft making, I'll probably use pen just so I have better contrast and it shows up better. What did I do on the last big DH4 map that I want to evaluate here? Let me get my phone and take a few quick and dirty snapshots. (i.e., not meant to be high quality scans. I put the poster board on the bed and literally just took some snapshots with my phone. Obviously, the lighting isn't great, and the focus is sometimes in and out.)

While the mountains themselves look fine on this map, their placement relative to each other does not. They seem too separated from each other into odd mountain "zones" rather than mountain ranges. I wouldn't draw them like this today. (Although I have seen professional maps that look not terribly unlike this with their mountains. Just sayin'.)

In general, though, the difference is one of taking time more than anything else. I've always seen my mountain style as highly reminiscent of Christopher Tolkien's style, and it is, at least at an individual mountain level. But his placement of them was tighter, and therefore featured more individual mountains (although they were also narrower than the region shown here, which makes that easier to do.) I probably deviated from that subconsciously just because it's quicker and easier to do fewer mountains a bit more widely spaced. I think that there's two problems with that, though. The first is that I tend to fill up too much space with mountains this way (probably also an artifact of how much space I had to work with since I was drawing on a poster board) and the second is that I obviously just don't quite like it as much. Tighter mountain placement looks better. And if I'm smarter about placing my ranges so that they don't have to be quite so big, it's not necessarily too much more time consuming to draw them either. My loose placement was probably just a bad habit that I got into subconsciously, on one level, but it was probably also a reaction to a problem that I'd created for myself; by needing to have such big mountainous areas, I needed to put a lot of work into filling in the details on those areas. and this was how it turned out. 

Then again, maybe that's just one example of where I'm somewhat refining and improving my technique from the past based on more examples that I've seen and better evaluation of the examples that I already had, too.

This snapshot shows lots of different things, but I mostly took it to focus on the coast, since it shows a portion of a kinda sorta Italian peninsula (complete with a fantasy Corsica and Sardinia) in a fantasy Mediterranean, and therefore shows lots of coast. In the past, I'd double or even triple lined coasts. I'm actually not sure why I didn't do that here, but probably it was related to me not wanting to take the time. In retrospect, that was a major mistake, as the coastlines don't really pop and at a quick glance, they're not very obvious. The coastlines are just lines and don't look like much of anything. Some kind of texturing, stippling, hatching, or something is obviously important just to make it much more clear what exactly it is that we're looking at. Again, this was the only time I've ever drawn a map this size; usually I've drawn it on normal sized sheets of paper. I think the sheer size and amount of coastline to double or triple line intimidated me and I just didn't do it. I guess; I don't even remember now. Because I knew what I was drawing, I guess it didn't really occur to me that it was more difficult to read until I pulled it down and looked at it after a few years of not looking at it. The exception, of course, being where I had cliffs on the side of the sea, because drawing in the cliffs gave me something, certainly, to look at that made the demarcation quite evident.

See those marks where it says Untash Badlands there to the left, and where it says Farmlands there in the center? I'd never done this before, and it was meant to indicate rolling hills, downs, badlands, or just some kind of uplands in general that maybe weren't quite so defined that I'd want to draw in a ton of little hill shapes. I not only had never drawn that like that before this map, I don't recall seeing them done that way anywhere else either. I don't remember what made me think of it, but I had forgotten the technqiue, so I'm glad I looked at this again. Although if I wanted more specifically "hilly" country I'd probably use a more tried and true hills technique that's kind of like the mountains, but lower and rounder, I do really quite like this techique too for some things. For one thing, it can be a filler, that suggests that an area isn't just flat, boring and empty, without necessarily suggesting anything too terribly specific that's there. Just some rolling terrain of some kind to show that it's not just completely blank.

This image is meant to show the swamp area there in the middle, but maybe it's also a good time to talk about rivers, since I have some prominently featuered here. I actually quite like how my swamps turned out back then, although compared to coasts, mountains and forests, that wasn't ever something that I spent as much effort on getting a style that was my own. Today, I'd probably add a few other minor details to make it even more swampy, like some small horizontal lines or hatching that looks watery, and maybe the suggestion of some longer, bent grasses with cattail like tops on them here and there in the grass too. But those are some somewhat subtle improvements. I actually think my swamps still look like swamps to me.

I usually follow the Christopher Tolkien style of drawing rivers as black lines and roads as dotted lines. For whatever reason, I draw rivers as "white" features here, and I don't like the effect as much anymore. I wouldn't go back and do that again. I also didn't even put any roads on this map. Another thing that I don't know why I would have done, but my upcoming map certainly has some. Keep in mind, that I say roads as dotted lines; a lot of people say dotted lines and then draw them as dashed lines. 

My forest technique is shown here, although again, I've come up with a few more details to improve it slightly since I drew this map. But this is still pretty close to how I do them. I had gotten away from doing the suggestion of trunks at the bottom of the forest at this phase in my map-making career, but I'd actually go back and add that, as well as some horizontal hatching on the sides to suggest shadow or just grounding it in the map so it doesn't appear to be floating over the terrain. I've been a fan of the "cloud" style of forest for a long time, but it has to be done well. When I was young, my cloud forests looked more like clouds and less like forests, but I don't think that that is the case with this at all; it certainly looks more like bushy vegetation. With the improvements that I've come up with since, it looks even more like it. Most of the youtube videos I've seen of people showing off the style don't do it very well, honestly. It's no wonder that many of them don't like it, but they tend to blame the technique itself as being one that they don't like, rather than their implementation of it.

And I'd never really drawn canyonlands before. I don't love the way it looks here, and I probably wouldn't draw them quite this way again. Which is good; I actually have some that will feature prominently in my new map. It's nice that I have better techniques now.

And finally, these snapshots probably show the limitations of my calligraphy. Some of my lettering looks pretty nice, but others, especially the smaller stuff (names of cities and whatnot) doesn't really. My "sketchier" map will feature my own handwriting, but my hybrid hand-drawn and digitized one will feature digitually inserted labels using a nice font on my PC.