How you choose to display (or not display) forests will lend your maps a feeling of realism. Forests are as much a part of fantasy worlds as mountains and seas are and should be treated accordingly.

This post is about skill application. If you want to learn about strategies for placing, sizing, and labeling forests, you should read Designing Fantasy Outdoors Maps (which will eventually point you here).

This article concerns itself mostly with larger-scale forest construction. However, at the bottom, there’s a section titled “Drawing Sparse Forests” which describes a technique that is great for city-scale maps.

Blocking in Forests

You’re going to draw your forest shapes with the Brush tool.

This gives you your forest shape. Right now, they’re blocks of color on the map, which probably doesn’t look very good. Now you can apply some styles, and you have a couple of options and what you will do depends on the design style you’re going for.

Take One: Styling the Forest Shapes

If you don’t want to have a “hand drawn” look, you can directly stylize the shape of your forests. When styling forest areas, you’ll almost always want to add a stroke and a pattern. Here are two of my favorite ways.

Take Two: Stamping Trees

If you don’t want to style the shapes of your forests, you can add “stamped” trees using the same technique you would use for stamping mountains, as explained in the section titled “Take Two: Stamps” in the drawing mountains tutorial. This method provides a very “old world” feel to your map but it can be very slow and tedious to do it and you can end up coloring outside the lines.

Forest Bounds

A nice effect sometimes – especially with “stamped” forests – is to indicate the forest’s boundaries. You’ll want to do that with a Shape layer and some effects. You’ll be going back to your original forest layer (which you may have renamed to “Forest Bounds”) but I’m going to call it Forest here.

Make a shape layer copy of it.

Now you’ve got a nice dashed border for your forest areas.

Bonus Take: Patterning with Tree Stamps

So okay. You want to have that nice old-world feel of a stamped tree forests but you don’t want to spend a lot of time doing the stamps. Well, I have a solution for you that uses patterns of your stamps.

I’ve provided two patterns for you (see “Importing Your Own Patterns” in Photoshop Layer Styles and Effects for how to do import them for use). They are naturally #999999, which is a mid-grey, and useful for many kinds of blend modes (but you’ll nearly always use Multiply). You can create your own patterns, however, if you don’t like these.

It looks a bit janky, though, since the pattern cuts off in places. You’ll fix that with an Eraser and Rasterization.

And done. Apply some other tricks (color, boundaries, etc.) and you’re good to go.

Drawing Sparse Forests

At a certain scale (about when a single tree is sized at 2 or 3 pixels), it becomes viable (and possibly desirable) to show a much greater amount of edge texture in your forests as well as drawing areas with sparse trees. At this level of fidelity you probably aren’t going to be doing “stamped” trees but rather fully blocked areas with texture.

You can, of course, set your brush to 3 pixels and just start hammering away at the canvas along the forest edge for a couple of hours to get that kind of texture, but I am here to bring you the magic of Brush Settings and save you a ton of effort. Knowing how to use brush settings correctly will make you a bad-ass.

Now, your brush will paint lots of trees at the same time. Try it! The individual trees will be scattered along the axis up and down randomly. To make an area denser, just draw over it again.

Knowing how to do this will allow you to draw forests with my favorite technique: Inside Out. The principle is the same, except you start with a large brush and work your way down in size.

Forests drawn this way may benefit from removing or altering inner glows and strokes. Without either, it creates a possibly pleasing watercolor effect.