This is a set of several blog posts of over 60 thousand words, most of which were published at the same time. I intend to keep updating this series, and will update this post (and the child posts) with new links whenever needed.

I wrote this because when I started seriously making maps for my games, I found a plethora of tutorials in a zillion places, few of which were cohesive and anymore than cursory explorations into the topic. Most assumed a significant amount of pre-knowledge, either in skills (Photoshop) or in general cartographic practices. I wanted there to be a place where new enthusiasts could “one stop shop” for techniques without having to deal with a complicated interface. There wasn’t one, and so I made it.

I have broken my treatise up into several sections, each of which has their own sub-sections and pages. Posts are intended to provide usable information and skill practice but are no means exhaustive on the subject. They are presented in a rough order, but feel free to jump around. Even if you know Photoshop backwards and forwards, I urge you to read even the “beginner” posts because I describe certain techniques useful for cartography.

You can access a full table of contents from the sidebar (which you can make sticky or not). If you find value in this, please drop a little something in the tip jar. I am also available for commissions.

General

This section provides an overview of the various types of maps that are used in fantasy gaming as well as covering several aspects of cartographical best practices and techniques, such as how to label mountains or coastlines.

• Fantasy Map Types – A broad overview of the various styles of fantasy maps.
• Fantasy Cartography Best Practices – Information about general cartographic practices, such as label positioning and fonts.
• Library of Patterns – A collection of all patterns used through the series.

Photoshop Skills

This section will teach you everything^* that you need to know about using Photoshop to create maps. You may want to skip this section and come back to it as you need to learn anything.

• Photoshop Basics – A quick set of basic tips for Photoshop.
• Photoshop Shapes and the Pen – How to use the various shape tools in Photoshop.
• Photoshop Layer Styles and Effects – How to make things look cool.
• Photoshop Blend Modes – How to make things look even cooler.
• Photoshop Typography – Managing type and its shapes.

* Not actually everything.

Map Making

This section shows you how to apply the photoshop skills you learned in the Photoshop section to the knowledge you gained in the Overview section to make practical and beautiful maps.

• Fantasy Map Design Basics – Tricks and techniques used in the construction of all map types.
• Designing Fantasy Outdoors Maps – How to design large-scale maps of outdoor areas.
• Designing Fantasy City Maps – Building and designing settlements at a medium scale.
• Designing Fantasy Blueprint Maps – How to make classic-style dungeon maps.
• Designing Fantasy Isometric Maps – Quick and easy ways to make beautiful isometric maps.
• Designing Fantasy Battlemaps – Maps intended for use with miniatures.
• Randomly Generating Landmass – A technique for automatically creating realistic shorelines.
• Drawing Mountains – Several ways to draw mountains on maps.
• Drawing Forests – Several ways to draw forests on maps.
• Managing Battlemap Assets – Obtaining and managing assets for your smallest scale maps.
• Printing Maps – Crafting professional looking real, physical objects.

Battlemap Techniques

This section includes an ever-expanding library of techniques to use for creating battlemap assets and elements.

• Battlemap Techniques Index – Links to everything.
  • Technique: Moss – How to add realistic looking moss to maps. Also works for lichen.
  • Technique: Puddles – How to add puddles and create wet surfaces.
  • Technique: Stairs – How to build sets of stairs.
  • Tree Stumps – How to indicate trees and their stumps.
  • Technique: Water – How to make realistic looking water effects.
  • Technique: Windows – Buildings without windows are dreary.

Special Thanks

Representational elements convey limited information about a thing. What it is and its relational location but are rarely accurate with regards to size or shape. Circles to represent cities, square icons to mark doors in a building, X marks the spot.

Exact elements convey much more detail about the thing shown. These elements will be accurate to location, size, and shape, and may have more or less detail depending on the map’s scale.

The distinction matters and the choice as to where an element falls on the scale matters.

Take for example a large-scale map – a large island. Here, the locations of coastlines are fairly important and are likely drawn accurately (to the fidelity of the map’s scale). However, cities and towns are usually marked representationally, with dots or squares or stars. Their positions on the island are accurate, but you don’t draw buildings. Likewise, this map will include major roads, and while the routes they take may be accurate, the marks themselves are representational (roads are typically not wide enough to appear on large scale maps).

I’ve come up with a handful of broad categories into which I have discovered the types of maps I make fall.

• Outdoors. Large-scale maps that show large areas of land and the geography of an area.
• Blueprints. Small-scale maps that detail the layout of a building or a dungeon. They can be overhead or isometric (angled)
• Battlemaps. Tight-scaled maps that are appropriate for use with gaming miniatures. They often show single rooms.

Outdoors Maps

These are your classical wilderness map. They can have any scale but typically fall into “world”, “continent”, “island/region”, and “city or town” scales. The map should scale to be just larger than the entire area it is attempting to display (e.g., if your city is 7 miles by 7 miles, the map should show 8 by 8).

Outdoors maps use hexagon grids and are almost entirely representational. This is likely true no matter what scale you use: you’re not going to be drawing individual trees, you’re going to draw the shape of the forest. City-scale maps rarely need individual buildings; blocks are often sufficient.

Some things will be drawn at radically increased size because they need to appear on the map (because they’re important, like a major river) but the actual size of the object would be invisible at the scale. For instance, there are no rivers that are 5 miles across, but have to be drawn at that size in order to appear at the map’s scale.

It’s easy to try to get too detailed. That’s a bad path to head down. Zoom in too much and you might as well make a battlemap. Outdoor maps are mostly about showing geographical relationship. The city of Florence is located on the River Arno. The Sierra Nevada mountain range runs along the eastern edge of California. The business district is south-west of the city capitol.

Note that maps of the underground (or “underdark”) fall into this category as well.

There are two tutorials about designing outdoors maps:

• Designing Fantasy Outdoors Maps: A discussion about the design of larger-scale outdoors maps
• Designing Fantasy City Maps: A discussion about designing smaller-scale outdoors maps

Blueprints

These maps show relational space within a structure. They’re for indoor areas and the classical dungeon map falls into this category. They can have many scales (really it’s just the size of the artboard you’re working with), but there are two major types: overhead and isometric.

Blueprints use square grids. Accuracy is of importance but excessive detail is not. For instance, doors must be shown (accuracy) but they should be shown as simple squares (representational). Drawing wood paneling on doors at this scale is overkill.

A blueprint shows room layouts and building structure. They should rarely describe room contents unless it’s important (e.g., a large fountain, statue, or a grand piano) but important structural elements (where the bar is located) may be included.

Blueprint maps are most often “overhead,” where the details are shown in a flat two-dimensional plane. There is another type of blueprint map, isometric. Isometric maps are useful to show two-dimensional spaces in three-dimensions, and use a diamond-shaped grid.

There are two tutorials about designing blueprint maps:

• Designing Fantasy Blueprint Maps: A discussion about classic-style dungeon and building maps
• Designing Fantasy Isometric Maps: How to work in an isometric view

Battlemaps

These are highly detailed, zoomed in maps, intended for printing and use during a game session. Battlemaps can be for indoor or outdoor areas. These maps are intended to show the objects in the area and their sizes and relationships to each other should be as exact as possible. Is there a gap in the wall? It gets drawn. Show where the road’s edge is. Show furniture in rooms.

When you work on a battlemap, you have to be conscious of three dimensions in new ways. For instance, a tree may be a rough circle 20 feet across when seen absolutely from above, but the players are going to be interacting at the ground level, where the tree trunk may only be 3 feet across. In this case, you’d draw the tree’s trunk. If you want to get fancy, maybe add in the shadow of the tree, or a rough outline of where its leaves cover, but usually that’s not necessary.

Because battlemaps have so much detail, it’s good to draw things realistically. This can be daunting if you aren’t possessed of great drawing skills. Never fear! 90% of making a battlemap pretty is handled with Photoshop layer effects and shapes, which are easy and fast to use once you get the hang of them.

There are several tutorials regarding the creation of battlemaps:

• Designing Fantasy Battlemaps: The master battlemap design tutorial
• Making Battlemap Assets: A primer about building individual battlemap assets
• Battlemap Techniques: a collection of multiple techniques for building specific battlemap elements, such as stairs, puddles, and moss

This post describes several best practices when making fantasy maps. I put the word “fantasy” there because fantasy maps don’t have to follow a lot of the Great Unbreakable Rules and have built-in audiences and purposes (this is my disclaimer so that Actual Real Cartographers don’t try to say “well, actually…”).

There are no Photoshop techniques described herein. Much of this information is repeated within individual “Creating Maps” posts, but I wanted to collect it here. Many times, other articles in this series will point you back here (usually about font choice). Some people may find this information dry or may already know a lot of what’s here. I’ll try to be entertaining.

On Information Architecture

Information architecture deals with the organization of information. Whether you’re aware of it or not, you are exposed to information architecture thoughts all the time. If data (of any kind) is presented to you in an organized fashion, there has been some degree of information architecture applied, even if it is as simple as alphabetizing a list.

Information architecture provides hierarchy to the data. More important things are called out differently than less important things. Trivial or non-relevant things are omitted entirely.

Consider this map of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. What does it show? What’s been left out? What’s accurate and what is not? The lines, stops, transfer points, and cities are called out, with the lines being the most visible (because they are the most important).

You’ll notice, though, that the lines themselves aren’t remotely accurate when it comes to distance or direction – they’re scaled to be useful while on the line. Street roads and highways aren’t included, nor are any cities where BART doesn’t stop.

Maps are one of the purest and oldest forms of information architecture that exists. Every map that you have looked at is telling you something and that something is being presented in a specific, intentional way. Even what is not on the map tells you something.

When designing a map, it is very important to know what the information is that you’re trying to display. This information can be derived from the map’s audience and it’s purpose.

Audiences

A map’s audience is the group of people who the map is designed for. This can drive many decisions about what to include or omit. Sometimes it’s good to think of a map’s audience as a kind of role.

When working with Fantasy maps, you have three basic audiences and they will often overlap. Each audience can (and will) be looking for something completely different.

• Players. These are the people playing the game – your local crew. They actively require information from the map to help them make decisions during play.
• Gamemasters. These are the people who run and manage games. Gamemasters need different information than players (usually secret things, like the location of traps, or hidden ruins). They have an active need for information.
• Enthusiasts. These people enjoy looking at the maps for entertainment purposes. They do not actively require information from the map; in a sense, they are just “browsing”.

Purposes

A map’s purpose describes what people are going to use the information it provides for.

A terrain map’s purpose is to show its audience where mountains and hills are. A coastline map’s purpose is to show its audience where shoals and coves are located. A dungeon map’s purpose is to show the Gamemaster the layout of the rooms and where the traps are. A battlemap’s purpose is to show the players the immediate locality.

It’s okay for maps to have multiple purposes. For instance, a well-designed battlemap can serve two masters: the players for game-play and enthusiasts who may be enticed to play the game by the map’s beauty.

(You should always try to think about the Enthusiasts. I know people who buy games just to look at the maps.)

For the most part, though, fantasy maps have a small set of purposes:

• As Illustration
• As Strategic Aids
• As World-Building
• As Story Guides

Illustration

The primary purpose of all maps is illustration. Maps show where things are! It’s that simple.

Players, Gamemasters, and Enthusiasts all use maps as illustration, if only to know where things are in relation to other things.

Hand out maps – maps that the players pick up along the way, for instance – share this purpose. They are used to illustrate elements of the game’s story to the players (this is not the same as Story Guides, below).

Strategic Aid

Players will use maps as strategic aids to plan their activities.

They use outdoors and overland maps to plan journeys (“we need to get to this city, and there are four roads there, and the short one goes over a pass but the long one looks the safest…”) and they use battlemaps to know the immediate terrain so that they can perform well in combat situations.

World-Building

World-building is something that happens naturally when designing maps. This purpose most often makes itself known during the design phase of a map, usually world-scale maps.

Plop a continent down on somewhere and fill it with jungles and places that have cool names. No one is going there just yet, but as the world designer you’re thinking about it. What exactly is the “Black Water”? What is the “Wandering City” or the “Great Tortoise?” Who knows. I just created some cool places.

Put weird things in and eventually you (or your players!) will figure it out.

Story Guide

The Gamemaster is the only one who uses maps as a Story Guide. Story maps are specifically purposed and are intended to be kept secret from the Players because they include details that the Players should not (or cannot) know, but that the Gamemaster must know.

The classic dungeon blueprint map is the best example of this kind of map purpose. Here are the traps, there are the secret doors. This is how high the water will rise when the trap is sprung. Those types of things.

Outdoor and wilderness maps can fall into these purposes, too. A Gamemaster may have an additional, secret copy of an island map that shows where ruins of the Lost City of Arretium are located, or the secret cove where the Pirate Kings of Umbria make lair.

On Titles

A map’s title is one of the most meaningful things to show. The title can provide several key pieces of information to the audience, the most important being what they are looking at. The title reflects its overall purpose.

For general area maps, simply give it the name of the area (“The Island of Atlantis”, “The Free City of Firenze”, or “The Secret Temple of the Dread God Dyoig-Notho”). However, maps with specialized information should call that out (“Trade Routes of Western Terracopia”, “Sewers Under the City of Napoli”, or “Occurrences of Wild Magick Blights between 1200 and 1300 Common Reckoning”).

The map’s title should be large and in charge. It should usually be placed towards the “top” of the map but if space or detail prevents this it can be moved to the bottom.

Additional details that should go into the map’s title can include when it was made (“Drafted in 1345 Common Reckoning”) and any caveats about the information presented (“As Known to the Macedonian Navy”).

(You don’t have to put titles on battlemaps and in fact this is discouraged.)

On Labels

Labels on maps show the audience what a location or object is. How a thing is labeled depends on what it is: road, city, mountain range, river? Desert or sea?

An element’s label, position, and design can reveal additional information to the audience. There are some best practices for this.

Fonts

The choice of a label’s font is very important. Fonts should be readable. You’re trying to impart information here. Some fonts that are great for websites (Helvetica Neue) are not so great for fantasy maps, while others (Luminari) feel right at home. You don’t want big, thick, or complicated fonts (Cloister Black) for labels, and if you use Papyrus or Comic Sans I will hunt you down and drink your blood.

Note that for one-off, very large labels (like the map title) you can use the complicated fonts^*.

^* Except Papyrus. Never, ever use Papyrus.

Serif and Sans-Serif Fonts

The word Serif means “feet”. Serif fonts are those whose characters have little feet on them. Sans-serif (literally, “without feet”) fonts do not. Modern fonts, especially on websites, tend to be sans-serif. Typewriter fonts are serifed. Most old-timey fonts are going to be serif fonts.

This is important as the distinction between serif and sans-serif is immediately obvious to the audience and helps them make mental connections between similarly labeled elements easier.

Typefaces

A typeface (or a “font family”, depending) is a collection of fonts that are similar. The distinction between a typeface and an individual font can be messy to the layman. Individual fonts (“Times New Roman Italic” or “Times New Roman Regular”) are part of the greater font family (“Times New Roman”). Most typefaces have four members: regular, italic, bold, and bold italic, but some have many, many more.

When you select a font from a drop down, you’re actually selecting a Typeface. This is usually the “regular” version of the font. When you set it to italic, you’re selecting the “italic” version of the font.

As a general rule, you should have no more than three Typefaces on your map. This does not include capitalization, bolding, or italic treatments, nor does it include things like font stroke or color^* (I usually stick with Trattatello, Crimson, and Copperplate Gothic).

^*You can make an exception for the map’s title. Title fonts don’t count against your font count.

Capitalization

You can choose to use ALL CAPITALS when defining a label style. This makes that style distinct. Capitalized labels are generally used for large or ethereal things (the labels for states or nations, for instance), to indicate hierarchy (ward names and districts), or relative importance (major thoroughfares vs. alleys).

Alternate Ligatures

Some fonts (like Trattatello) have additional alternate ligatures. Think different versions of specific characters that may have additional swoops or lines or can connect to other letters differently.

These variants are great for adding flavor to your maps and make them pop. Feel free to use them but don’t go overboard.

I’ll discuss how to use them in Photoshop Typography but you should be aware that they exist.

Positions

Hoo-boy. Label positioning.

How labels are positioned depends on the kind of element. In many cases (forests and lakes) the labels should be centered inside the area. For others, the label should be spread and rotated over the element.

Settlement labels use special rules and have a hierarchy:

• Settlement labels should never cross a shoreline, river, or boundary line.
  • If the boundary is to the left of the settlement, the label goes on the right.
  • If the boundary is to the right of the settlement, the label goes on the left.
• Settlement labels should almost always be horizontal. Never curve a settlement name.
  • An exception is for highly detailed, zoomed maps where labels can be placed at angles if the situation requires it.
• For settlements inside the land, the label should be placed in the following order, given available space:
  • Top right, left aligned
  • Right, left aligned
  • Top left, left aligned
  • Bottom left, left aligned
  • Bottom left, right aligned
  • Left, right aligned
• For coastline settlements, the label should be located in the water, and to the top or bottom corner as makes sense given the coastline.

Sizing

Labels for elements should be sized according to their relative importance. Larger cities or islands should get larger font sizes. Seas and oceans should have very large fonts.

It’s best to pick the smallest font that you’ll be using and work upwards.

Curves and Spreading

Labels can and should be curved and spread to follow along an element on the map if the element warrants it.

• Labels for Roads should not be spread out but should follow the path of the road.
• River labels should curve and spread along the river. Do not spread the label over the river’s entire length; instead use multiple labels.
• Mountain Range labels should curve and spread along the length of the range, if possible.
• Sea and Ocean labels should be large and spread out to as much space is allowed. The size and position of the label should give a rough indication of its area.

Direction

In nearly every case labels should be read left-to-right (or right-to-left in languages like Hebrew or Farsi). The main exceptions to this rule are for rivers, seas, and mountain ranges, but also for some things like plateaus. Rivers have special rules; see below.

In the case of mountain ranges, seas, and plateaus, the label direction should be as much as “left-to-right” as possible. This may mean rotating the text in one degree or the other. The text should not be “upside down”; you should still be able to read it (this may be unavoidable, though, so be kind to yourself). Consider the center of your map and rotate around that.

The exception to this rule is for rivers and other running water. With rivers, the direction the text flows imparts additional information: the direction the water runs. The start of the text should be towards the river’s source (e.g., the mountains) and run towards its mouth (usually the sea).

Color

You’ll define the color of your labels when you define the style of them. Colors should be readable. If there is a chance it won’t be, add a stroke to it.

Use the same color for the same types of elements. If you pick #222222 for settlement labels, then all settlements should use that color. This is not a hard and fast rule; for instance, settlement labels on land can be dark, but over water maybe you want to use #dddddd. Consistency is the key: if you make a change, make sure it’s applied everywhere (e.g., don’t set all of your labels over water to a light color except one).

Natural vs. Created Elements

It is important to understand the distinction between natural elements and created elements. Your font treatment should be different between the two and consistent within the type.

• Natural elements are those that were not created by human (or dwarf, or elf) hands. Forests, mountains, islands, rivers, seas, deserts, lakes, and the like. Lakes created by dams also fall into this category.
• Created elements are those built by people. They did not come into existence naturally. Cities, buildings, ruins, roads, and bridges all fall into this category.

Classically, natural phenomena are labeled with italic fonts and created elements are labeled with non-italic fonts. This has blurred a lot in modern times, so that specific rule doesn’t apply. That doesn’t mean you are off the hook, however.

What you should do is pick one of your font families for each type. The font families should not be similar; they should be obviously distinct. You can (and should) use different treatments (italics, bold, all caps, etc.) for different things as well.

I label my natural elements using Trattatello (a handwritten style font) and my created elements with Crimson (a good serif font). I label settlements in Crimson Semibold Italic, while roads are labeled with Crimson Roman. Both fonts are in the Crimson family, but one is a fleshy oblique font and the other reads more like a typewriter font.

You may be asking yourself, “Self, I’m allowed three font families, but he’s only described using two! Where’s the third?” Good question!

Use the third font family for ethereal, informative things that do not have specific locations. Things like state or nation names (This is where I use Copperplate Gothic).

Alternate Names

Some places have multiple or alternate names. This is most common when a place is known commonly in one language by one group of people and in another language by others. These are called “Alternate Names”.

Alternate names should be placed below the main label and de-emphasized. They are usually surrounded by parenthesis or brackets. You can de-emphasize an alternate name in several ways (or multiple ways):

• Using a Smaller Font
• Reduced Opacity (tricky with the Type tool; you’ll have to make two labels)
• Using a Different Color
• Using a Different Font
• Using Different Layer Effects (tricky; you’ll have to make two labels)

On Compass Roses

A compass rose is that part of the map that shows which direction to orient the map. They are incredibly important for all maps except battlemaps (which don’t need one).

Like everything else on a map, the compass roses should provide meaningful information. The most minimal bit of this what direction to orient the map.

Compass roses also point to the principal winds or directions (North, North-East, East, South-East, South, South-West, West, and North-West) using color and size on the points to differentiate between major and minor winds (some societies used different names or had many, many more winds). Advanced roses can show the difference between true north and magnetic north.

Compass roses can take many forms. The most basic of them simply point to the North. A single north pointer is sufficient for blueprints and battlemaps, but you may want to get more elaborate when it comes to outdoors maps.

Compass roses can be part of your mythology. The one I designed for my Terracopia fantasy setting includes hints to some of the deeper secrets of the setting in its design, for instance (a style choice that required a significant simplification of the rose). Other times, you’ll want a more “standard”, multi-point star.

On Key Maps

A key map is a map-within-the-map. Key maps are useful to provide a greater context for the map’s audience. They show a larger scale map with the area of the current map highlighted for context.

Key maps are most often used for sections of a larger world map. They are of negative value with battlemaps, so don’t use them there.

However, I do want to cover some absolute basics. Even if you’re a Photoshop wizard, you’ll want to read the section about The Grid, as I’ve got some specific settings that work really well with fantasy cartography.

The Grid

You’re going to get so used to typing <command>’ that your fingers are going to fall off. That’s the key command that will turn on or off the grid in Photoshop. The grid is your friend, especially when it comes to shapes and polygons.

First, you’ll need to set it up. Photoshop’s defaults are alright but (trust me) you’ll want to have it super tight.

Now you have a grid that shows every pixel boundary. This isn’t super important with outdoor maps but you’ll find it invaluable with blueprints and battlemaps.

You’ll want to turn on “snap to grid”. This will ensure that when you set down points and lines in your shapes that they won’t be “halfsies” and create weird blurs.

You won’t turn the grid on all the time, and you’ll discover that it provides a color distortion effect when on, but when you’re moving anchor points around, you’ll think it a godsend.

Guides

Similarly useful to the grid, a Guide is useful for aligning objects and snapping them into line. Guides can be horizontal or vertical. There are two ways to add guides.

The second way is programmatically, and is useful if you need one placed exactly (e.g., at 4.25 inches in an 8.5 x 11 inch canvas).

You can move guides after the fact by switching to the Move tool and centering on the guide. You can prevent them from being accidentally nudged with View -> Lock Guides.

Layers

You need to understand what layers are. This is a “first-grade” lesson but it’s important.

Photoshop documents are structured in layers, in a stack, and read top-down. Layers can be turned on or off and individual effects can be applied to them. They can be duplicated and deleted.

You should never be afraid of adding or duplicating a layer. You will usually want to have one layer per object on the map, though “object” here can be broadly defined. For instance, I often make the entirety of a dungeon’s walls as a single vector layer.

Layers can (and should) be grouped into folders. You can turn a folder’s visibility off and on just like with a layer. Collect layers of like things together; that way you can turn them on or off if you need to as you work.

Additionally, you can give layers or folders colors. This can be useful when you have a lot of layers and groups to deal with (and you will, oh yes, you will).

Layer Comps

The Layers panel has a tab called Layer Comps. Layer comps are alternate views of a file. Each layer comp can define the visibility and layer style of any layer independently. This allows you to have multiple versions of your map in the same file. For example, you may want two versions of your map: one with color and one in black and white. Or you may want to have a version of a world map that shows nation borders and one that does not. You do this with layer comps.

You create a new layer comp by clicking the “New Layer Comp” button at the bottom of the pane (looks like a document). Give it a title (“Black and White,” say). This will create a new layer comp based on the current document state. Make changes to your layers (visibility, style, etc.). You’ll need to update the layer comp it for it to be saved.

With multiple layer comps, switching between map styles is a breeze. Note that adding layers and groups to the document does not automatically turn them on in the various layer comps; you’ll have to do that as you.

Selecting Whole Layer Pixels

A technique you will want to use a lot is selecting all of the pixels in a layer. This is a way for you to constrain where you’re editing or to do duplications (select a layer’s pixels, create a new layer, and use the paint bucket) or subtractions (select a layer’s pixels, switch to another, and hit <delete>).

Selecting a layer’s pixels is easy and requires only one click.

Smart Objects

Photoshop has the ability for you to define what are called Smart Objects. Smart objects are a great way to manage your maps when you have a lot of the same object over and over again, like settlement icons or bits of furniture in a battlemap. You can think of them as being similar to templates.

When you turn a layer or a group of layers into a smart object it becomes its own “mini document” that you can edit independently. Changes made to a smart object are immediately applied to all instances of that object.

Smart objects are non destructive. You can modify any cloned instance of a smart object independently (resize, mask, or even add layer effects) and it won’t affect the other copies (unless you modify the core object).

Making a smart object is easy.

You’ll have a new layer with a special icon inside it’s preview window. You can now duplicate this layer and move it anywhere you want.

Editing a smart object after the fact is just as easy.

You’ll notice that all the clones of the smart object will immediately update in your original document.

In the examples below, I have two icons that I want to convert to smart objects. I do so, and then clone the “City” icon several times. Afterwards, I edited the “City” smart object and changed its color to a blue.

You can “uncompile” smart objects by editing the object and then selecting and dragging the layers out of the smart object window and into your original canvas (drag to the original document’s tab to switch documents, then drag and drop the layers onto the canvas, not the layer’s tab).

Smart objects also allow you to use non-destructive filters on them (smart filters). However, how to use them is beyond the scope of this tutorial.

Gradients

I’m gonna be honest: working with gradients is a pain in the ass. Not because they’re difficult, but because they’re tedious. There’s a lot of back-and-forth with clicking dialogs and the like. Working with gradients is an exercise in experimentation.

However, you’re going to end up working with them from time to time so let’s talk about the gradient editors and how they work.

There are two main ways to add gradients: with the Gradient tool (a sub-tool found in the Paint Bucket menu) and through a Gradient Overlay Layer Style. Each behaves slightly differently.

When using the Gradient tool, the settings for the gradients are located in the top bar. When using layer styles, the settings are in the layer styles dialog. The biggest difference between the two ways of applying gradients is thus:

When using the Gradient tool, the direction of the gradient is set by clicking and dragging on the canvas, while in with Gradient Overlays it ise set in the dialog. Otherwise, editing gradients remains (mostly) the same (Gradient Overlays have a few extra bells and whistles).

Gradient Styles

There are several styles of gradients. They are:

• Linear. The gradient goes in one direction, source to end.
• Radial. The gradient flows outward from a central point.
• Angle. The gradient rolls away from its starting angle, in a circle.
• Reflected. The gradient goes in two directions from its center.
• Diamond. The gradient goes in four directions from its center.

You’ll probably use “Linear” and “Radial” the most.

Other Gradient Options

Gradients have several options beyond style that are important to know how to use.

• Blend Mode. Sets the blend mode for the gradient. You’ll want to use Color or Normal in most cases.
• Dither. Just don’t.
• Reverse. Changes the direction of the gradient to the opposite.
• Angle. Changes the direction the gradient is applied (Layer Style only).
• Scale. Changes the gradient’s internal scale. You probably won’t mess with this much; it can have subtle and unexpected effects.

The Gradient Editor

If you <double click> on the gradient box you’ll open the gradient editor. This window has several presets that you can immediately apply if you so choose (and you can save gradients to it).

The important thing to know is the bit at the bottom, with the color scales and stops. This shows what you’re gradient will look like.

The stops on the top of the preview denote the opacity of the gradient. The stops at the bottom denote the color of the gradient at that point.

Selecting any stop will allow you to edit the properties of it. Each stop has two options that can be modified: Color or Opacity, and Location.

You can edit the location of a stop by dragging it or entering a number. These numbers are percentages along the length of the gradient.

You can only edit the color on color stops and the opacity on opacity stops.

Adding a new stop is easy. Just click anywhere there isn’t a stop. You can drag it wherever you like or manually enter the location’s percentage.

To start, you need to know the difference between pixel layers and vector layers (also called “shapes” and “paths”).

A pixel layer contains that: pixels. Each pixel on the layer can be its own color or opacity. Pixel layers are difficult to work with because they’re “rasterized” – effectively “permanent”. You can overwrite pixels with other pixels, and you can mutate the layers, but it warps the pixels. However, pixel layers are very useful in other ways (especially with large documents).

A vector layer contains what’s called a shape or a polygon or a path. Vector layers are described with math that describes the coordinates of each of its anchor points and the connections between them.

Consider a red square that is 30 pixels by 30 pixels and is located at 100,100 (x,y). On a pixel layer, all pixels in the area between the area are colored red with an opacity of 1 (or 100%). On a vector layer, the same thing is described in math (anchors at [100,100], [100,130], [130,130], and [130,100], with a color fill of “red”).

You can resize both layers! But you will likely get blurring with a pixel layer when you do so, whereas with a vector layer the points remain exact. Since map making (especially blueprints) often requires rapid manipulation of shapes, vectors are the choice here.

The number of people I meet who think that Photoshop doesn’t or can’t do vector shapes well is weirdly high. Over the years, Photoshop has become my go-to for shape work.

Shapes

So how do you make them? It’s simple: you use the various Shape tools: the Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle, Ellipse, Polygon, Line, or Custom Shape tools.

Each shape tool has options (at the top bar) that you can modify. This is where you go to change the custom shape, for instance, or the border radius in a rounded rectangle. Don’t worry so much about fill and stroke right now.

The Pen

Okay, now that you’ve got shapes, it’s time to talk about the Pen tool. The pen tool also has several types, but you really just want to think about the main pen tool right now. This draws straight lines between anchor points. The pen lays down anchor points, allowing you to create arbitrary shapes. Just click on the first anchor point you laid down to close the shape (the cursor will change to indicate that you’ll be making a connection).

There are other pen tools. They can add or delete anchor points or change how they work. The big one to know is the Convert Anchor Point tool. It turns an anchor from being a solid corner to being curved with what are called “Bezier Handles”. Moving the handles around changes the curve of the point. Curves take some practice to get right.

The Selection Tool

Just above the Shape tool is the Selection tool. It’s either a black arrow or a white arrow, depending. The black arrow is the Path Selection tool and it will select all points and connections for a shape that you touch with it. The white arrow is the Direct Selection tool and will select individual anchor points. This one is far more useful for what you will do.

When you select individual anchor points, you can move just that point on the map. Want to resize only one half of a room? Select all the points on one side and not the other and you can move them with the arrow keys (hold down the <shift> key to move things by 10 pixels at a time). Hold the mouse and drag to move them all at once. Hold <shift> while dragging to force the motion to be in a line.

Combining and Subtracting Shapes

When you have two shape layers, you will often want to combine them or subtract one from the other. For instance, when I draw a battlemap room, I’ll often draw the shape of the room’s floor first. Then I’ll duplicate that layer, increase it’s size, and then subtract the shape of the floor (a duplicate layer) to create the shape of the walls. Or if I want a room that’s rounded on one side and square on the other, I’ll make a big circle shape and then merge it with a rectangle shape that is the same width.

Combining shapes is easy.

Bam. Now they’re a single layer!

But you have one more thing you need to do: merge the shape components. If you don’t do this, you’ll get weird effects when if you merge with another shape layer. To do this, select any shape manipulation tool (Shape, Pen, or the Path/Direct selection tool) and then in the top bar there’s a menu with a square or two square on it; you want to select the last thing in the list (Merge Shape Components). This deletes extra lines and combines anchor points that have the same coordinates.

Subtracting shapes is just as easy.

When shape layers merge they take the name, effects, and color of the “top” layer, always. I absolutely guarantee you that you’ll fuck this up a lot and have to undo work. You’ll forget to duplicate the layer you’re chopping, for instance, or you’ll lose some layer styles. It happens. You’ll get a rhythm eventually, though.

Making Holes

Say you have a shape for your walls, and you need to make a hole for an open doorway. There are a couple of ways to do this but the quickest is to add some anchor points along the shape and then delete some.

There are many layer effects. Not all of them will be useful to you (I’ve never in my life used the Satin effect, for instance) but some of them are so prevalent in my workflow I don’t know what I’d do if they went away.

Individually, the basic options of a given layer effect are easy to understand. Each one tends to have some more advanced features (such as contouring) but for the most part they are straight-forward.

Every layer effect has its own blend mode. Whichever blend mode you choose will change how the overall style behaves. Please be sure to read Photoshop Blend Modes for more information about blend modes when you’re done here; I’ll save discussing blend modes for that page.

Every effect also has an opacity slider. This obviously changes how opaque the it is and allows you to independently target them.

Some effects (like strokes) may be added multiple times. Other effects (like patterns or bevels) can only be applied once. If an effect can be applied multiple times there will be a “plus” icon next to it. There is a limit to the number of times you can add a specific effect. This will be most often used with strokes, glows, and shadows.

You can also use the layer styles panel to edit the blending options for the whole layer or to apply pre-defined styles from a library.

Layer Effects 101

Styles vs. Effects

The terms “style” and “effect” are often used interchangeably but they actually mean different things. An effect is a single instance (a stroke or an inner shadow). A style is the combination of several effects (the stroke and the shadow together).

A Note on CPU

Layer effects are heavy when it comes to Photoshop’s memory and CPU usage. The more layer effects and styles that exist, the slower and more difficult it will become to work with a document. This is compounded by a document’s size: the larger the size, the more work the system has to do to keep up.

Every time you move a layer with effects, the computer has to recalculate all the effects. If you move an anchor point, it has to recalculate all the other points. Drop shadows, glows (outer glows especially), bevels, and patterns are all “heavy” to calculate. Combine that with the math that blending modes require and you can find yourself burning battery pretty quickly.

Keep this in mind as you work and try to be economical (use groups over individual styles, etc.). You can also use a technique of Temporary Rasterization (see “Tip: Temporary Rasterizing” below).

Accessing Layer Styles

You open the Layer Styles panel for an individual layer by double-clicking on the right side of its entry in the Layers panel. Double-clicking the layer’s name will edit the name layer. If a layer already has had styles applied to it, a little “fx” icon will appear in the corner with a collapse/expand control.

Expanding the control will reveal all the effects currently assigned as well as their individual visibilities. You can turn on or off individual effects here by clicking on the “eye” icon (it disappears if the effect is turned off) or all effects by turning off the “Effects”.

You may find that the list of effects is short or incomplete. That’s because Photoshop will hide effects that aren’t being used from time to time. You can get them all back by clicking the “FX” icon in the lower left corner and selecting “Show All Effects”. You can also delete non-displayed effects from the same menu with “Delete Hidden Effects”.

Turning Off Layer Styles

By default, Layer Styles are turned on and display as you work. Many times, however, you’ll want to turn them off and work “naked” (usually for performance reasons).

Turning on or off layer styles is terribly easy:

Viola! The styles are gone! If you’ve been working in style mode for a long time, it can be a trip to see the changes. You may find errors in your maps that your styles are hiding as well (glows, strokes, and shadows can easily hide small gaps, for instance).

You turn them back on the same way:

Copying, Pasting, and Clearing Layer Styles

You will find that you often need to bulk apply a style you’ve designed, or you want to erase all of the effects from a layer. This is done by copying, pasting, and clearing layer styles.

Right clicking on a layer entry will open up a menu. In the middle are three options:

• Copy Layer Style. Copies the style into memory.
• Paste Layer Style. Applies the copied layer style to the layer.
• Clear Layer Style. Resets the layer and removes all styles from it.

Styling Layer Groups

Layer groups can be styled as well. The process to do so is exactly the same (double-click on the right side of the layer group). There are two major caveats to applying effects to groups.

The first thing to know is that the group’s style will apply to all visible layers it contains. This is often exactly what you want (say, you want to apply a color overlay to everything to create a sepia tone effect), but other times does weird things you don’t expect (like giving shadows to a layer’s already existing shadows).

Using group-level styles is a quick and easy way to change the style of all items. For instance, I like to group all of my labels for “water” areas together (the names of seas, lakes, rivers, etc) and then apply a single style to the group (a color overlay, a texture, a glow), which is then applied to everything.

You can achieve the same effect by doing a bulk style paste, but that’s ill-advised for two reasons.

The first is that each layer style present and visible in a document increases the CPU requirements of Photoshop. When styles are rendered, they’re rendered in order, then a group style is applied. If you have a folder with 20 items in it, all of which are supposed to get the same style, you’ll have 20 styles applied if you do them individually. However, if you apply the style to the group, there’s only one style applied (it is laid down after the group has been “merged” and becomes a single unit as far as Photoshop is concerned when displaying it).

The second is that you will have to maintain these styles. If you want to change the stroke color, you have to do that to every layer.

Now, there are times when you may want to do this (for instance, you want a white stroke around every text layer in the group except the ones on white backgrounds, in which case you want a dark grey stroke). I would normally put the exceptions into their own group, but if you want to be sloppy feel free, ’tis a free country.

Styling Smart Objects

Layers within a smart object can have their own styles applied. These styles are effectively “free” as they are pre-rendered by the Smart Object’s system. You can access the layers of a Smart Object by double-clicking its icon in the Layers panel.

You can style Smart Object entries themselves as well through the Layers panel as normal. These styles are applied on top of any styles that the Smart Object already has (this is useful for color overlays).

A Note on Light Sources

Many effects (such as bevels or shadows) depend on a light source. This is the direction that the light is casting from and affects how the effect is applied. Shadows, for instance, appear on the opposite side of the layer from the light source.

You can set the light source for each effect independently or you can use the “Global Light” (there’s a checkbox). If you have the “Global Light” checkbox turned on, there’s two things that happen:

• The effect’s light source will be the same as all other effects that have “Global Light” turned on, and
• Changing the angle or altitude of the light source will also change the “Global Light” value, which may not be what you want.

I nearly always set my Global Light values to 90 degrees with an altitude of 30 degrees.

Most of the time you will want to use Global Light except if you need two shadows coming from different directions.

When working with battlemaps, it is important to set your Global Light with a high altitude: 90 degrees. The reason why is that you want a top-down view and you’ll often be rotating rasterized objects and will need their shadows to be maintained.

Effects

Let’s talk about the individual effects and their types. I’ll go in order the order they are listed in the panel, top-to-bottom. This order is important to know: it is the order in which the effects are applied to the layer. The order is immutable, I’m afraid.

For each example, I’m going to show you what it looks like when applied to a red (#ff0000) square in the center of a white field. I will also include screenshots of the dialog used to manipulate it (but not the exact settings used).

Styles

The first entry in the list is a “pseudo” style called Styles. This allows you to quickly apply existing or saved styles to layers without having to recreate them. Simply select the style you want from the library present.

You can add a style you’ve created to your library. Apply your various styles as normal and then click the “New Style…” button on the right-hand side of the dialog. You’ll be asked for a name for the style; give it one and it will then appear in your library.

Blending Options

The second entry in the list, Blending Options is also a “pseudo” style. It allows you to control the layer’s overall blend mode (see Photoshop Blend Modes), the opacity of both the layer itself and the opacity of its fill.

Let’s take a moment to talk about Fill Opacity versus Layer Opacity. Both options affect how the pixels of the layer are displayed. However, the Fill Opacity affects the layer before styles are applied, while Layer Opacity affects the layer afterwards.

This is really useful when you just want to use a layer’s shape, but don’t want to show the layer. For instance, say you end up making a lot of screenshots of an interface and want to highlight certain areas. You’ll create a square or circle shape around the area you want to highlight, set the layer’s fill opacity to 0%, and give it a Stroke effect. Bam! Now you’ve got a border around your area and it isn’t blocked by the shape’s own pixels.

Bevel & Emboss

The Bevel & Emboss is a complex tool that can be used to create easy three-dimensional effects. You can control the type of bevel or emboss, the direction it goes (up or down), it’s depth, size, and in some cases how sharp the edges are. You will nearly always use inner bevels.

You will be tempted to use this effect to create pseudo-mountains. It can work fine, but there are gotchas and you’ll discover them as you go: they have to do with the way anchor points behave (it’s impossible to explain this; you’ll have to learn by trial and error). This is discussed in greater detail in Drawing Mountains.

Always use Screen and Multiply modes for your highlights and shadows here. If you apply them as “normal” details will fail.

Stroke

A Stroke is one of the most useful effects when it comes to cartography and Photoshop. You’ll find yourself applying strokes everywhere with varying degrees of opacity and blending. Shorelines are made with several strokes stacked on top of each other, for instance. Doors can become more easily discernible, walls more pronounced.

Use thin widths for creating definition; use thicker strokes to indicate interactivity (like with doors).

You can apply strokes in three places: Inside, Outside, and Centered. Only inside strokes maintain perfect corner fidelity: fat strokes on the outside and inside end up rounding in the corners.

The “overprint” checkbox is important. Flipping it on or off can do weird things to the opacity of the layer underneath the stroke. You will almost always want “overprint” to be on.

You can also use gradients or patterns as the fill for a stroke. I do this often when I want to create something like a pool. In the example shown, there are a total of seven stroke effects applied to it: three with a pattern overlay (the gold strokes and the thick marble stroke) and four of just a color (#222222) applied as Multiply and overprint to make the edges clearer.

When adding multiple strokes, each successive stroke must be larger than the one before it to appear (making this pool is described in the water technique for battlemaps tutorial so take a look there for it’s stroke layout).

Inner Shadow

The Inner Shadow effect uses a light source to cast a shadow in the inside of the layer’s content. Shadows are basically specialized gradients that are drawn by the light source. As such, they have start, middle, and end points, but they aren’t called that:

• Distance affects how far from the edge the shadow’s gradient will start.
• Choke affects the mid-point of the shadow’s gradient
• Size affects how far the shadow’s gradient goes from where it starts to where it ends.

“True” shadows should usually be a dark color set to Multiply but you may have your own ideas. Go with god.

You can adjust the shadow’s countour as well for interesting effects. Most of the time you’ll want the incline plane, however.

Inner Glow

An Inner Glow is similar to an Inner Shadow except that it is always drawn from the edges inward (instead of being directed by a light source). Like Inner Shadows, these are gradients, except you can’t control the gradient start point (just the Choke and Size).

If you set the Source to “Center” you’ll get the inverse of your glow (it will spread from the layer’s center).

For the forest example, the following settings were used:

1. Color: #6b5427
2. Contour: Reverse of default (double-click to edit the contour)
3. Choke: 25
4. Size: 10
5. Noise: 20
6. Blend Mode Overlay

Satin

The Satin style is similar to Inner Glow or Inner Shadow except that it applies the changes towards the center of the layer (unless you mess with the contour).

I honestly don’t find a lot of use for this one. I normally achieve its effects by using multiple Inner Shadows.

Color Overlay

A Color Overlay does exactly what it says on the tin: it takes a color and applies it to every pixel in the layer. You will most often use this with the Color blend mode, which changes the color value of the pixels beneath.

It’s terribly useful. When applied to a layer with a bunch of other details, the color will subtly affect things. A great trick is to apply a color overlay with #e1d3b3 as the color to a large layer group to give it a sepia-toned effect (which makes a lot of maps look great).

For two of the examples, I have applied a Color Overlay to a parchment texture in both yellow (#d7dd75) and green (#008740).

Gradient Overlay

The Gradient Overlay effect does just that: overlays a gradient. This is useful for subtly changing the colors of water layers, for instance (build yourself a nice gradient that passes through several shades of blue and green and apply it with a blend mode Color and apply it overtop a parchment layer).

The use of the gradient editor is described in more detail in Photoshop Basics.

You can control the angle, style, and scale of the gradients. I don’t recommend that you use dithering.

Gradient overlays can be tricky. You may find that you have to apply them in their own layer if you want to have them work with underlying textures. For the water example, the parchment layer is just set to normal, and a color layer of #0054a6 is set to Overlay on top of it. The color layer is given multiple gradients, each set to Overlay or Linear Light.

Pattern Overlay

My favorite effect – especially with battlemaps is Pattern Overlay. This effect allows you to take a pre-defined image and wall-paper it over the entire layer, giving it visual style. Over time, you will develop a large library of patterns (and many of them pulled from these tutorials; there are several included throughout).

The pattern overlay dialog is fairly straight forward but there are a few things you should know.

The first has to do with Scale. This will change the, uh, scale of the pattern. Large patterns will repeat more with lower scale numbers. You can scale up really high but I don’t recommend it as things start blurring very quickly. Scale down instead.

The second is Link with Layer. If you set this to false, the pattern will be applied starting from the 0,0 pixel of the document. If you set it to true, the pattern is applied from the 0,0 pixel on the layer.

You can see how this works by applying a pattern to a layer, turning off the “link with layer” checkbox, and then moving the layer around. You’ll notice that the layer moves but not the pattern. If you then turn the “link with layer” checkbox back on, it will freeze the pattern at that location, which is a neat trick (you can also click and drag on the inside of the object while the Layer Styles dialog is open).

The third thing is Reset Origin. If you have a pattern that you’ve locked in at a different start point (as described in the paragraph you just read), this will undo that effect and snap the 0,0 of the layer (or document) to the 0,0 of the pattern.

Most of the time you’ll want to apply patterns in “Normal”, “Overlay”, or “Multiply” modes. However, if you have a nice noise texture, applying it in Linear Light mode is probably what you want.

Importing Your Own Patterns

You’ll want to add lots of patterns to your library.

Outer Glow

An Outer Glow behaves similarly to an Inner Glow except that the gradients of the glow are drawn from the outside edges. Again, you can’t set the start point of the gradient, but the Spread value tells you how far from the edges the gradient will start and the Size value describes the gradient’s size after this.

You’ll nearly always use a Spread value of 0. I find other values are just ugly.

Drop Shadow

Drop shadows are also gradients but they are cast by light, like Inner Shadows. Drop shadows are
great for pulling things up off the page. You’ll use them most often with battlemaps but I like to apply them to things like legends and titles on other maps as well.

Go re-read the Inner Shadow section above, but know that it appears outside of the layer, and that the Spread value behaves the same as the Choke slider on Inner Glows.

Tip: Temporary Rasterizing

As you work on a map, you may find that it gets slower to use and Photoshop starts chunking because you’ve got too many layer styles or you have a lot of anchor points in your shapes

This can really become apparent while you’re dollhousing (see Designing Fantasy Battlemaps). I built an orrey component once that consisted of over 50 shapes, each of which had multiple layer effects and tens of anchor points – for a solid object. Moving it by even 10 pixels could take 30 seconds or more.

The solution here is rasterization. This takes your shape/layer and all of its layer effects and burns them into a pixel layer. Pixel layers are incredibly lightweight (to Photoshop, at least). You can take all your complex objects and rasterize them and then they can be moved around easily. Further, they don’t require the CPU to overtax itself.

The way you do single layers or groups is different.

Keep all your original shape layers. Maybe name them “XXX Shape” to distinguish them from “XXX Pixels”.

A layer’s (or a layer style effect’s) blend mode changes how the rendered pixels of the layer behave based on the rendered pixels beneath it. There are many modes, each of them with different math, and a full reckoning is beyond this short (hah!) tutorial. However, there are a handful of modes that you’ll use more often than others and which one you choose often depends on how “dark” the current layer is.

You’ll find a lot of happy accidents with blend modes, by the way. Experimenting with them is a great way to find new things and to learn how each mode behaves. I highly recommend it.

You can edit a layer’s blend mode from either the Layers tab or through the Layer Effects dialog. Note that blend modes do not reset when you turn off Layer Effects.

Basic Blend Modes

Here are some basic blend mode types.

• Normal. Show the rendered pixels of this layer exactly as they are.
• Overlay. Allow the layers below to “ghost” through. This is good for most layers of medium darkness. Does not work well if the lower layers are darker.
• Screen. Applies the layer in a “lightened” fashion (the “Lighten” mode also does this, but in a slightly different way). Use when your layer is light-colored overtop a medium or dark-colored layer.
• Multiply. Darkens or burns the layer into those below it (the “Darken” mode also does this but in a slightly different way). Use this when your layer is darker than the ones below it. It’s useless against a dark layer.
• Color. Applies the color of the layer to the ones below, subtly changing them to match. This is best used when the entire layer is a single color, or as a layer effect (Color Overlay with mode set to “color”).
• Color Burn. “Burns” the color of the layer to the ones below, overall darkening the layer but enhancing parts of its color profile.
• Color Dodge. “Dodges” the color of the layer to the ones below, overall lightning the layer and de-emphasizing parts of its color profile.
• Linear Light. Applies the pixels in a more black-and-white, high-contrast way. Lighter colors (especially white) tend to disappear. This one is super-useful for adding texture and noise.

Here is the same black-and-white image (an illustration showing convergent evolution) applied over a texture pattern in various blend modes:

As you can see, the various modes can have significant effects. The Soft Light mode is probably what you’d want to use if you wanted to make a parchment version of this image feel coherent. I love the effect of Difference but that probably won’t work very well. However, Divide may work very well, especially if the opacity is lowered.

Here is how the same patterns and shapes appear on a parchment background in various modes. The circles are just colored circles; the little icon is a simple but meaningless set of brush lines.

Blend modes can be applied to layer groups as well. When doing so, the entire group is affected as if it were merged. Groups have an additional mode, Pass Through, which means “don’t do anything funky at all”. Setting a layer group to Normal has the effect of “crunching” everything and canceling any effects it overlays. You’ll hate it; don’t use it.

Additionally, you can apply blend modes to various layer style effects. This will change how they display. The example below shows how applying a Pattern Overlay effect changes depending on the blend mode of its application and the color of the shape it’s being applied to.

The typography tools are not difficult to master and are frankly intuitive to use once you understand the basics of what each one does. Subtle effects with tracking and leading can lend better readability to your maps than simply sticking labels everywhere.

Typography Basics

There are a handful of useful concepts to understand about Photoshop’s typography tools.

Editable Text

Text layers are continually editable. You can always go back and change the text in the layer to add or remove words, fix speling mistakes, or change anything else about the font. This will continue to work as long as you don’t rasterize the text or convert the text into shapes.

Paragraph Text Boxes

The Type tool can be used to create re-sizable paragraph text boxes. These work in conjunction with the paragraph panel. Use them when you have blocks of text that you need to keep sized correctly.

You can convert existing text layers to paragraph text layers as well. The paragraph text box will be automatically sized to the exiting point text layer.

You can convert them back with Convert to Point Text.

Inline Changes

Nearly all character options can be applied to text inline. This means that you can edit a line of text and select a single word or character and change anything about it, from its typeface to size to color.

The only thing you can’t alter inline is any kind of layer style or blend mode as these are applied to the entire layer and not parts of it.

Rasterizing Text

If you rasterize a text layer you will turn it into pixels. This is un-doable, but useful if you want to manually add stress effects to a text layer with a brush (rather than applying a layer style that can achieve similar effects).

Converting to Shapes

You can convert text layers to shape layers. When you do so, the text is converted from an editable font to a raw shape layer. Each anchor point on the text’s shape can then be moved or deleted independently. Be aware that you will no longer be able to edit the text; this is a one-way trip.

This is useful if you want to apply different styles to different characters in a line of text or if you want to merge text shapes with other shapes (like working a map’s title into some border decoration).

The Character Panel

While many of these options are available in the character toolbar, you’ll use the character panel most often. Just go ahead and dock it on the right. It will be that common. Set the paragraph panel behind it while you’re at it.

Most Commonly Used Options

Typeface Selector

The typeface selector chooses the main typeface or font-family that you are using. The selector will show you examples of the fonts you have available. If you have lots of fonts, it has a built-in search function.

Variant Selector

The variant selector chooses italics, bold, or any of the other sub-variant fonts available in the typeface that you’ve selected. Some fonts – especially handwriting ones – don’t have variants.

Size Selector

The size selector does just that: changes the font’s size. This can be used inline or on the whole layer. You can enter any number but the drop downs are safest.

You can also directly size text with the Transform tool (<command>t) but be warned that this will set your font sizes to less than whole numbers.

Color Selector

Unsurprisingly, the color selector changes the font’s color. This can be used inline or on the whole layer.

Tracking

Tracking determines how much space exists between the letters in a line of text. You will use this often to spread labels out, especially in mountain ranges and rivers. Some fonts (like Trattatello do not have good default tracking values, so you’ll nearly always want to change it for those.

Less Commonly Used Options

Leading

Leading determines the space between lines of text. Some fonts – especially those with deep “y” type characters – will want to have larger leading values than others.

You won’t often use this with map making because labels are almost always single lines of text. However, labels with alternate names will benefit from this option.

Type Variants

Type variants will transform all of the text into a specific mode, like super-script, sub-script, all capitals, or small capitals. You will most often use the “all capitals” mode with map labels.

If you typeface doesn’t include bold or italic variants, there are faux bold and faux italics options, where Photoshop attempts to alter the characters for you. They don’t always work the way you expect, however.

Advanced Options

Kerning

Kerning controls space between specific characters. You can only use it inline. It is used when the default tracking isn’t sufficient for one or two specific points in the text.

Say you have your tracking set a little larger than normal (25) but you want the first character in the string to but up against the second. You would use the kerning option to change the spacing just there.

Kerning allows you the choice between metrics and optics. Metrics kerning sets the spacing based on the math inherent in the font – the kerning the font’s author designed. Optical kerning sets the spacing based on the vector shapes of the characters. Which one you use depends on the font and the effect you desire so you’ll have to experiment.

Baseline Shift

The baseline shift option moves selected words or characters up or down below the font’s baseline. You can use it when you want to “sink” part of a word or raise another. If you combine this with an inline size change you can effect super-script or sub-script; however, there’s an easier way to do so with the type variants tool.

Use this sparingly, if at all.

Alternate Ligatures

Some fonts (like Trattatello) have several alternative ligature options. These are alternative characters or connections between characters that can be used instead of the default. For instance, a font may display different capital letters if the character is the first in the line of text.

They can be used inline or on the whole layer.

Options You Won’t Use

You might use these options someday but you won’t use them when making maps.

Horizontal Scale

The horizontal scale controls the horizontal distortion of the characters. It’s goofy. Don’t use it. Use tracking instead.

Vertical Scale

The vertical scale controls the horizontal distortion of the characters. It, too, is goofy. Don’t use it. Use leading instead.

Language Selector

This option changes the language that Photoshop assumes you’re working in. This doesn’t translate text (for that you use the googles); rather, it informs the text engine various rules about when to hyphenate and so forth. You never need to change this.

Aliasing

This one turns on or off jankiness in your font display. The default setting was arrived at by many years of discussion and development by experts in fontography and typefaces. You will be a fool to change it.

The Paragraph Panel

The paragraph panel provides options that affect how text flows on the screen – even with single line text layers. You should dock this panel on the right, behind the Character Panel.

Alignment & Justification

A paragraph’s alignment tells it where to anchor the text: left, right, or middle. These are going to be your most common choices. You can also choose several options for justification, which attempts to space the words out cleanly in the space available. A paragraph’s alignment is different from it’s justification but justification always overrides alignment.

Note that if you are centering several lines of text with each other (using the Move tool’s alignment options), you will want to set those text layers to “Center” alignment before doing so. The Move tool’s alignment functions operate on the mathematical center of the layer and the font’s metrics may return a different number than the “true” center of the text.

Indent

This controls how deep the initial indent is with paragraph text. Since you’re not going to be writing a lot of copy on maps, you won’t use this much.

Margins

You can set the margins of a paragraph with four options: top, left, right, and bottom. This adds padding around the paragraph edges (left and right) or between paragraphs (top and bottom).

You probably won’t use this very often because you probably won’t be working with large volumes of text and can just drag text boxes to the desired position.

Hyphenate

Checking or unchecking hyphenate will cause paragraph text to hyphenate where applicable. This is probably something you don’t want, so leave it unchecked.

Curving and Warping Text

From time to time you will want to have a text layer “warp” and follow a bend, like when labeling a river, road, or mountain range. In this case you will use the Warp Text tool located in the type tool’s options bar. This will open a dialog that provides access to many different text warping options.

You will almost always use “Arc” or “Flag”. Remember that you’ll also be able to rotate the text using the Transform tool and spread the text using the character panel’s tracking option. Together, these tools will allow you to make labels that follow river or road paths.

Styling Text

Text layers can be styled like any other layer. Strokes, color overlays, and patterns are common effects to use with text layers and, when applied well, can give your maps a pop and vigor that sets you above the crowd.

When applying effects to text layers, it is easy to over-do it. Text effects should be subtle because text should be readable. Sometimes less is more. For instance, strongly stroked text can “vibrate” and be difficult to read. Try adding a subtle glow instead of a heavy stroke to bring out the edges of characters.

This article discusses some basics that apply to all maps types. Where there are deviations, they will be noted in the individual “Creating Maps” articles.

On File Resolutions and Dimensions

The size and resolution of your map drive many things. It is important to understand these two concepts and how they relate to one another. First, let’s talk about resolution.

On Resolutions

The resolution (or dpi) is the number of pixels that appear per inch in the document (“dpi” stands for “dots per inch”). There are two common resolutions for images: 72dpi and 300dpi. 72dpi images are intended for viewing on screens: televisions, computers, phones, etc. 300dpi images are intended for printing.

There is a paradox here, in that 72dpi images are rarely shown at 72 pixels per inch; the concept of an “inch” doesn’t mean a lot with computers anymore. However, 300dpi for printing absolutely means a lot. When you work for print, you know exactly what’s going to print and where.

Have you ever found an old digital photograph, or a graphic on the web and then printed it out? It probably came out either really, really small (a 72dpi image printed a a 1:1 pixel ratio) or it came out really blurry and pixelated (a 72dpi image that was automatically scaled up to 300dpi). Scaling images – pixel images, that is, which is what gets sent to a printer – will always result in blurring. This is true whether you’re printing it or re-scaling it inside of Photoshop itself.

The inverse is not so true: scaling an image down in size will cause pixels to merge and become smaller. If you have a 20×20 pixel white square, if you size it down by 50% you’ll have a 10×10 pixel square. Pixels get merged: not just left-and-right but also top-and-bottom. Downscaling by evenly divisible amounts always works better than odd amounts, and clearly scaling in 50% increments works best.

When creating new maps, always use 300dpi, even if you don’t think you’re going to print it. It costs you nothing and you will regret it if you ever have to upscale.

With most maps, altering the size and resolution can be done after the fact. You want to add more detail to your island? Up the scale, clean some edges, no problem. However, with battlemaps, it is important to start knowing the size of the map. Battlemaps must always be made at 300dpi. Don’t make me come after you. If you set battlemaps to lower resolution, it’s not my fault, and you can’t blame me.

On Dimensions

When choosing the actual starting size of your map’s canvas, it helps to know if you’re going to be printing it or not. I suggest that you always assume the answer to that question is “yes” because if you decide not to print it, you’re out nothing. It costs no extra time or effort to work with a file that is prepared for printing versus one that isn’t, and if you ever decide to print a non-print ready file, you’ve got some problems.

Trust me on this.

Accordingly, you should always set you file size to match. Now, the actual size (x by y pixels) is not as important as the relative dimensions of the file (the x to y ratio). A file that is 2400 x 3600 pixels in size has dimensions of 2 by 3. 2 by 3 is the magic ratio so always use that.

I always like to print my maps out to posters at 24 inches by 36 inches. However, you’re not dealing with super-accuracy, so you can select smaller canvas sizes (indeed, I suggest this because working with large documents can become slow). For large, world-size maps, I select 4000 by 6000 pixels but for most others I stay with 2400 by 3600 pixels. I find that they print just fine scaled up or down with that.

Note: With a battlemap, you must know ahead of time how big you plan to print it and set your canvas size to that exactly. If you’re going to print at 11″ by 14″, set the canvas size to 11 inches by 14 inches, with a display resolution of 300dpi. More information about battlemap sizing strategies can be found in Designing Fantasy Battlemaps (see, it’s so important that I’m repeating myself already).

Photoshop has some default canvas sizes you can pick from that may meet your needs but honestly just create a new document of any size and then resize it immediately.

Scaling Grids

Nearly every map will want to have a Scaling Grid grid. This is an overlay layer that displays a grid of hexes or squares, where it is known that the distance between the two sides is consistent. Spoiler alert: This tells the viewer the scale of the map.

• Outdoors maps use hexes
• Overhead Blueprint maps use squares
• Isometric Blueprint maps use diamonds
• Battlemaps can use squares or hexagons, depending on the game

You may be asking yourself, “Self, why do some maps use hexes and others squares?” Go you! You should congratulate yourself for making such an astute observation. The answer depends on the purpose of the map and the most useful way to display distance.

A Hexagon is the same distance from edge to edge on six sides and give a much more accurate depiction of distance within a 360 degree arc (a total of 6 directions are accurate). However, while hexagons stack very neatly, they are not as useful for defining architecture (no truly “straight” lines to follow) and they’re impossible for use with a grid coordinate system.

A Square is the same distance from edge to edge on four sides and gives only 4 directions of accurate distance. This is extremely useful for blueprints. They stack neatly, but diagonal distance is almost impossible to calculate easily. They are very useful for defining architecture, and are perfect for coordinate systems.

Basically you want to use hexagons when the fidelity of distance must be preserved over larger areas (islands) and squares when the fidelity is important over small areas (rooms and buildings). For accuracy’s sake, in the really real world, distance between places on maps was determined by using a protractor and if a map had a grid, it was a square grid with lookup entries. But games do not require perfect fidelity.

In some games, especially those that use miniatures, the game’s “playing field” is defined by the use of hexes over squares or vice versa. If your miniatures rules use hexagons, use hexagons even if squares make more sense.

When using hexagons, you have to make a choice to use vertically stacking or horizontally stacking hexagons. It doesn’t really make much difference but the choice determines the initial hex layouts.

Here are several grid patterns (1 each at 1000, 500, 300, and 100 pixels). They are a default grey in color. If you want different colors, there are ways to do that with color overlays (which I’ll explain later) or you can save them off and change the colors manually and re-import them.

Applying a Scaling Grid

You’re going to make a master grid layer and then duplicate it several times. You will want to have a version that will be useful even if you have layer effects turned off, for one. Other duplications may come about if you choose to include multiple grids.

Make an initial, “master” grid.

Setting Grid Scale

Here’s where you have to do some math. The patterns I provided are scaled at different pixel resolutions (this is so you get less blurring if you scale up or down). You’ll have to choose which pattern to use and what scale to use it at.

If your map is 3600 pixels wide, and you want that to represent a distance of 500 miles, and you want to show hexes where each hex equals 100 miles, you’re going to want 1 hex to show up every 720 pixels (3600 / 5 = 720 pixels). The closest hex to that size is a 1000 pixel hex (always start larger). So you select that one as your pattern and you set the pattern’s Scale to 72% (72% of 1000 equals 720).

It’s usually best to stick with whole numbers, to be quite honest, but we do what we must.

Scaling Grids Without Layer Effects

Now, this grid will only be visible when you have Layer Effects visible (see Photoshop Layer Styles and Effects). Since you’ll probably be working a lot with them turned off, you want a grid that remains.

Now you have a “working” grid. Turn the visibility of this layer on or off as required.

When it comes time to finalize the map, you’ll end up doing a lot more with this grid. I’ll discuss that later, but for now you have something you can work with.

Sub-Grids

When working with grids (especially with hexagons), it is often desirable to break a larger grid up into smaller bits. You’ll want one large grid, where a hex equals 500 miles, and then an interior grid, where a hex equals 50 miles. Generally, the smaller-scale grid will be the “main” grid and the larger-scale grid will be used for, well, scale.

This is easy to do. Just create another layer and apply a new grid, with a different size and scale. If you’ve got a “large” grid that uses a 1000 pixel pattern, make a smaller grid using a 100 pixel pattern. Make sure to use the same pattern “type” (e.g., don’t mix and match vertical hexes with horizontal hexes).

You’ll want to give them different opacity values until such time as you apply layer styles or colors to them.

Pen Tablets

I absolutely recommend that you get yourself a pen tablet and learn to use it. Drawing things is infinitely easier and faster to do with a pen than with a mouse. Tablets can be expensive, however, so they may be out of your budget.

If you do decide to get a tablet, I recommend one with pressure sensitivity. You won’t be doing a lot of pressure-sensitive work, but when you do, oh boy does it make a difference.

Compass Roses

Most maps can be improved with the inclusion of a Compass Rose. I talked about compass roses in Fantasy Cartography Best Practices but didn’t describe how to make one.

Compass roses can take many forms. The most basic of them simply point to the North. A single north pointer is sufficient for blueprints and battlemaps, but you may want to get more elaborate when it comes to outdoors maps.

Compass roses can be part of your mythology. The one I designed for my Terracopia fantasy setting includes hints to some of the deeper secrets of the setting in its design, for instance (a style choice that required a significant simplification of the rose). Other times, you’ll want a more “standard”, multi-point star.

I always design and build your compass roses in separate files so that I can easily pull it into a new map. I also try to keep the rose as a single shape – but that won’t be possible with more elaborate designs. Where possible, use shapes instead of pixel layers so that it can be resized and retain its fidelity.

Legends

If your map has a legend you will want to add that. There are two kinds of legends that maps normally have: numeric legends and icon legends. Legends have two parts: the legend key and then their corresponding icons or numbers on them map. Legends should be readable and easily discoverable, so place it front and center.

Numeric legends are the kind most often associated with dungeon maps. They are often numbers placed within rooms, with a master key that explains what they are. Icon legends match icons to their corresponding labels, explaining what certain symbols mean.

Numeric Legend Keys

If your legend is entirely numeric, creating the key fairly straightforward.

Bam! Now you’ve got a legend key. See below for styling tips.

Icon Legend Keys

Icon legend keys are a bit more complicated to create because you have to account for the icons themselves. In this case, the process is the same as above except you’ll need to resize the text area inwards to account for the icons you’ll be adding.

Make copies of all the icons you use and pull the copies into the Legend Key layer and align them next to the associated text. Use the alignment tools to center them, etc.

Legend Numbers

If your legend is numeric, you need to place the numbers where they go. You’ll need to create a ton of new layers for this.

Styling Legend Keys

You don’t want you legend keys to look like crap. Apply some styles to them. I usually end up having styles on individual layers within the Legend Key group and then one that applied to the group. Here are my favorites:

• For the Backing, a dark stroke around the entire thing with a color overlay to give it some oomph
• For the whole Legend Key group, a drop shadow and a noise pattern set to Linear Light

Styling Legend Numbers

Legend numbers need to be readable, so choose a good, readable font, size and color. You may want to add strokes or other effects to help call the numbers out.

Scale Marks

A Scale Mark tells the viewer the map’s scale. You’ve already determined that when you set the map’s Scaling Grid but that information needs to be imparted to the user. This can be done very simply: “1 Square = 10 Feet” or “1 Hex = 50 Miles”. I like to include icons to indicate this, but there are nice line styles that can exist as well.

Scale marks aren’t usually necessary on battlemaps as the scale is assumed by the game (e.g., “5 feet per square”). When writing numbers, use the number itself and not a word for it (“10 feet” versus “Ten feet”) as humans recognize numbers faster than words.

You can place your scale mark wherever feels natural and is easily findable. I like to keep mine associated with the Legend Key or the map’s Title. Humans are trained to look in the bottom left and bottom right corners if the scale isn’t immediately visible, so those are also places.

Map Titles

A map’s title helps people create the context for what they’re viewing. This is especially important if there aren’t any other identifying marks on the map. A random island shape without any title could be anywhere (which may make sense for pirate treasure maps). So mark a Best Practice: Always include a map title.^*

Titles can convey other information besides what you’re looking at (“The Island of Tuscan”), such as the time period that the map is viable for (“c. 1256 Pompeii Reckoning”), or implying that the map is imperfect (“As Known to the Kraith Oligarchy”).

There is additional information that should be shared in the title are if it is not included elsewhere, such as the Scale Mark.

Pick a nice, dramatic font that is readable at a couple of sizes as your title may consist of multiple weights. I liked to center the paragraphs, but this is totally up to you. You’ll want to have a contrasting font color (unless you apply a good stroke to the text).

I always apply a light noise pattern, a bold stroke, and a shadow or outer glow when I stylize these. Again: your map, your style.

* An exception to the best practice here is with battlemaps. In these cases, the narrative of your story will usually provide the player’s the context they require, and if you’re building a whole dungeon as a battlemap, you don’t want them to know that the room they’re entering is called “Pit Trap Room.”

Finalization

There will come a time when you realize that you’re just noodling on the map, moving pixels for pixels sake, for instance, or doing nothing more than dollhousing. This is when you’re probably done and it’s time to finalize the thing. There are a handful of steps here but none of them are overly difficult.

Different map types have different finalization needs. These difference are elaborated on in the individual “Creating Maps” entry for the map type.

Scale Grid Finalization

Battlemaps have special concerns for finalizing the Scaling Grid. See Designing Fantasy Battlemaps for more information.

Pick a blend mode for your grids. Overlay usually works very well, but play around with it. You may want to experiment with applying a color overlay, rasterizing that, and then selecting a different blend mode, even.

If you want to re-color the grids (for example, you want to have red large hexes and blue small hexes), you have a couple of options. The first is to “Rasterize Layer Style” on a grey grid and then apply a color overlay to it. The second is to put the grid inside of its own layer group and apply a color overlay to the group.

Place the grid layer in the stack where it works best. You probably want the grid “high” in the stack but below the title, compass, and any legend boxes, certainly. Depending on your various blend modes, you may want to re-order other things.

Designing an outdoor map is a process of layering in detail. You can’t know where your cities are until you know where the rivers are, and you can’t know where those are until you know where the mountains are, and you can’t know where the mountains are until you know the shape of the landmass.

For this tutorial, I’ll be creating a small island map with a few mountains, rivers, forests, and towns. The process of creating an outdoor map for larger areas (regions, continents, or even the whole world) is the same, however. It probably won’t be a fully finished and fleshed map when done, but this is a tutorial, so what can you do?

Considerations

A Quick Note on Realism

Large-scale outdoor maps do not lend themselves to realism in any way. They are designed to convey information about vague geographical relationships and rarely if ever are intended to be used as the final word on a matter.

If the scale of your map says that 1 hex is equal to 10 miles, and the actual size of a hex on your map is 50 pixels, then a mile is 10 pixels wide. Most rivers are less than a quarter of a mile in width, so they might show up with an accurate scale (but appear very spidery). Roads (being roughly 30 feet wide) are simply too small to appear at that scale.

Further, it’s rarely possible (or desirable) for complete accuracy with regards to forests, mountain ranges, lakes, or rivers. You’ll have to make a lot of editorial decisions and accept a significant degree of vaguery. As your scale gets smaller, smaller objects can start appearing.

Note also the ephemeral nature of some things. Trees can be cut down. Villages can be burned. Nation borders change. Some things simply aren’t worth mapping.

Printing and Sizing Strategies

Make sure you’ve read the sections “On File Resolutions and Dimensions” in Fantasy Map Design Basics.

As a general guide, the larger the surface area you’re trying to show, the larger the map canvas should be. If you plan on printing your maps (and why would you not?), starting with a template canvas that matches the dimensions you are going to print at is a good idea. You can always scale down if you feel like working at the larger size is burdensome.

For this island, I’m going to size the map to 2400 by 3600 pixels at 300dpi. This will allow me to work with it easily but it will still look good when printed at a poster size.

Scaling Grid

Outdoor maps use hexagon for their Scaling Grids. Scale them accordingly, as described in Fantasy Map Design Basics. The larger the map, the more it will benefit from having two grids.

Label Organization

I highly recommend keeping your text labels in their own layer group. Place this group in the layer stack above all visual elements in the map – including your Scaling Grids.

I further recommend making sub-folders within: “Water”, “Settlements”, “Territories”, “Mountain Ranges”, “Forests”, etc. This way you can bulk-apply layer styles by just working on the folder.

Design Steps

1. Create Base Water Layer
2. Add Landmass
3. Add Mountains
4. Add Water
5. Add Forests
6. Add Verdancy
7. Add Other Terrain
8. Add Settlements
9. Add Roads
10. Add Title, Scale Marker, and Legend
11. Finalization

Create Base Water Layer

First, you need a base “water” layer. There’s no point in having land without water, as it were. You just want something blue for now; you’ll style it later.

Do this even if your landmass will cover the entire canvas. I have found that the best method does not add water (e.g., you’re drawing a blue river overtop your land), but removing land (you erase it to show the water beneath).

Add Landmass

Once you have the Water layer, you will want to add the landmass. There are several ways to do this and each one has its benefits and drawbacks (for this tutorial, I’m going to use a randomly generated landmass).

You will find that you’re going to be constantly coming back to edit this layer. You’ll need to clean up a coastline, or move a river, or add an island. Thus, it’s good to allow for easy editing: which means pixels.

Making Landmass With Brushes

Starting from whole-cloth with brushes is can be daunting. Coastlines are randomly fractal and humans like to think in patterns and symmetry, so intentionally creating the chaos of a coastline is difficult.

I find that this is a sub-optimal method for mass generation, but the only acceptable method for continual editing.

Bam! Landmass. Edit it to your heart’s content using the Brush and Eraser tools.

Making Landmass With Shapes

You can draw your landmass with the various shape tools – especially the Free-Form Pen tool. Doing so allows you to keep fidelity of shape if you ever resize the map, but at the sacrifice of detail and ease of manipulation. No matter how good you are at creating and working with shapes, it will not be as fast as working with a brush and an eraser.

Create your landmass layer (called “Landmass Shape”) as normal. Fill it with white (#ffffff). Add, remove, and merge shapes as needed.

(Note that you should absolutely work in shapes for everything when designing a Battlemap.)

I’m serious, though: Don’t do this. You will regret it almost instantly.

Making Landmass via Random Generation

Another way to create landmass is by random generation. This technique provides very realistic looking coastlines but can be labor-intensive. It is also worthy of it’s own sub-tutorial, entitled Randomly Generating Landmass, so go read that. I’ll wait.

Landmasses generated in this way are pixel layers and thus are edited using the Brush and Eraser tools.

We’re going to use a land-mass generated via this method for the rest of the tutorial.

Making Landmass via Tracing

If you want to make a map using an existing landmass as a template, tracing is the way to go. When I started designing Terracopia, I began with a map of Europe as my starting point. Maybe you want to create a mythical version of England and need your map to match its shape. Who knows? Either way, you’re starting from a template.

Ta-da! You’ve got a landmass to work with. Feel free to edit it (with the Brush and Eraser tools) as needed.

Cleaning Up Landmass

Now you need to go around and clean up the landmass. Now, depending on your Photoshop skills, you can mess around with Sharpness filters or try to do things by modifying selection sizes and the like, but I’m going to tell you to just skip to the end of that horrid process and break out a brush. You’re going to get here anyway; might as well start there.

We’re going to go around the entire map and redraw the edges. It’s tedious, but it makes it look great.

After you’ve run the sharpen filter, you may want to apply a dark 1 pixel stroke to the layer. Doing so will show you where things are wonky or don’t have full opacity. Spot edit those places.

In many places, this won’t do much. In others, it will do a hell of a lot. I absolutely recommend using a Pen Tablet for this because while it is possible to do this with a mouse, it will be hella tedious.

Coloring Landmass

Right now, your land is pure white (#ffffff). While this is good for early contrast, it’s not that great when you go about applying layer effects (you can’t apply a useful color overlay while also adding a texture, for instance). This is all about color math and the colors pure black (#000000) and pure white (#ffffff) leave nothing for the math to play with.

Just color the landmass entirely.

Every pixel that was white should not be tan, with edge fidelity maintained.

Styling Landmass

Right now it’s just a big blob of tan. You’ll want to make it look like something. I find that the best way to start is by applying some simple style effects to make it pop. I’m going to go over these effects independently.

Stroke the Shorelines

You should always place at least one stroke on the shoreline, if only as a defininging separator. I like to have my shores extend outwards. In the example shown, there are a total of 9 strokes. Exactly none of them are set as “Overprint” (try it and see what happens).

Texture

I like my maps to feel like they were drawn on parchment. You may want a more realistic flavor. Again: it’s all about your personal style.

Pick a good, grungy texture and apply it as a pattern overlay on the Landmass layer. Play around with the blending mode and opacity for this to see what kinds of effects different textures produce. You may very well decide that “Normal” is the best way (and it often is, for certain patterns). The point here is to make it visually interesting beyond its outer shape. Adding texture does that.

If you want to use a parchment pattern, I would recommend finding a very large one that has lots of variant textures – ideally one that is bigger than your canvas. A great trick is to use the same pattern on your land and your water (using the same registration point) to create a more seamless visual experience.

Try that.

You can try other blend modes for the water layer! Some will make it darker, others lighter. You may want to change the color of your water layer, or apply some graident overlays to it. Experiment and play around with it. You’ll find that the way various blend modes interact with their base colors can change drastically.

Labeling Landmass and Islands

Landmasses and islands are a natural phenomenon. Pick your font accordingly (see Natural vs. Created Elements).

Labels for islands should be placed near the island they represent. The label should readable and straight and should be sized relative to the island’s size. The best thing to do is find the smallest size label you’re going to use and go upwards from there (otherwise you may find that your smallest labels are unreadable).

Add Mountains

Once you’ve got the shape of your coastline, you have to figure out where the mountains are. Mountains (and hills) drive the location of everything else: rivers flow out of mountains to the coasts, and people live on the sides of rivers.

Landmasses – especially islands – are created with mountains. Islands are just the tops of mountains whose bases are at the bottom of the water. Mount Haleakala, on the island of Maui, is the tallest mountain in the world, if measured from its absolute base deep beneath the ocean. The large island of Gont in the Earthsea Stories is a single mountain.

Mountain Considerations

On Plate Tectonics

Mountain ranges are created wherever two tectonic plates collide (plains are created where glaciers once slid). Looking at your landmass shape, think about where your mountains might be. Mountain ranges run more-or-less in a single direction. There may be spurs outwards, but for the most part they work in a line (the mountains around Mordor are an impossibility).

Here’s an illustration of how plate tectonics work:

Get a thick quilt and lay it out flat on the floor. Now get a couple of books. Your copies of the Dungeon Master’s Guide and the Player’s Handbook will work perfect. Set them both down on the quilt, about ten inches apart. Press down firmly on both – firm enough that the quilt will move with the book – and slowly push the books towards each other. You’ll notice that the quilt will start bunching up between them into folds. The folds will usually be straight.

This is how mountains are made: tectonic plates slide together and push the land between them into the air. Mountian ranges will only “bend” at sharp angles when more than two plates are intersecting.

On Mountain Ages

In geologic time, the younger a mountain range is, the taller and sharper its peaks will be. As Bilbo Baggins learned from Gollum, time “beats high mountain down,” so the oldest mountain ranges (like the Appalachians) are sometimes no more than foothills.

Rainfall, wind, and rivers wash away mountains over time through the process of erosion. This, too, is something you should think about when designing your mountain ranges. If your world has suffered a cataclysm within the memory of its inhabitants, the mountains created by the event will be new: tall, wide, and very pointy.

Determine Mountain Paths

You want to lay down the areas where your mountain ranges run. This is basically a sketch of lines; you aren’t drawing the mountains yet. You want to have an idea of where the tectonic plates collided.

For larger mountain ranges, you may want to increase your brush size so that you have an idea of their relative size as you work.

You now have a rough map of your mountain ranges and the forces they exert. This is where you’re going to draw your mountains.

Drawing Mountains

Drawing mountains is a big task that requires its own tutorial. Please jump out and read Creating Maps: Mountains before continuing.

Create a layer group called “Mountain Ranges” and place it above your Mountain Sketch. Draw your mountains in layers inside of the Mountain Ranges layer group.

Labeling Mountains

Mountains and their ranges are a natural phenomenon. Pick your font accordingly (see Natural vs. Created Elements). Mountain ranges are labeled different from singular mountains.

Labels for mountain ranges are drawn along the range. Use the Type tool options to spread the name of the range out and bend it to follow the range’s path.

When calling out a specific mountain, use a triangle shaped icon (point up) placed at the mountain’s peak. This is the anchor for the mountain’s label, which should be below and to the left or right, depending on what else is there. Obviously, those positions may not work, but try to be consistent.

Labeling mountains is often tricky because depending on the way you’ve drawn them, they can be messy or detailed. You will want the labels to be readable. For ranges, I will typically pick a dark color for the font itself and give it a light stroke around the outside or center to draw it out. For peaks, I will stick with a solid color if I can, and add a stroke only when necessary.

Add Water

When you’ve got the mountains in, it’s time to add water. Or, more precisely, it’s time to subtract the water from the landmass.

Rivers flow outwards from mountain ranges and either go to the seas or pool in lakes. When seen at a high enough scale, they rarely go in straight lines, instead meandering in S shapes around subtle (and not so subtle) hills. Only the mightiest of rivers (think the Mississippi, Amazon, or Nile) can overcome the forces of gravity to run in straight lines.

Rivers rarely split. They may flow around small islands from time to time but they do not fork very often. Small rivers and streams will join larger ones. Again, these always flow away from high ground, seeking the lowest ground possible. Further, they nearly always start as streams or smaller tributary rivers that start in mountainous regions (unless the source for the river or stream is a naturally occuring spring).

Take a look at where your mountains are. Does it look like there might be any lakes in the valleys they have created? If so, “add” them. You may need to edit your mountains to accomodate (e.g., move their edges, or erase parts that will overlap your lake – the method required depends on how you’ve drawn your mountains).

Labeling Water

Oceans, seas, rivers, lakes, and streams are a natural phenomenon. Pick your font accordingly (see Natural vs. Created Elements). Moving waters (rivers and streams) are labeled different from still waters (lakes).

Labels for rivers and streams are drawn along the path of the river. Use the Type tool options to spread the name of the river out and bend it to follow the water’s path. The direction the text flows is important here as well as it indicates the direction of the river’s flow: the start of the text lies towards the river’s source and the end of the text should go towards the river’s mouth.

When two rivers join, they can form a new river (with its own name) or they will take the name of the larger of the two tributaries. For example, the Ohio river is a tributary of the great Mississippi river. The water of the Ohio ceases to be called the “Ohio River” once it merges with the Mississippi, which is a much larger waterway.

Labels for lakes are generally centered within the lake area itself.

Special water elements (like magnificent waterfalls) require an icon. I like three vertical lines. This is the anchor for the waterfall’s label, which should be below and to the left or right, depending on what else is there. Obviously, those positions may not work, but try to be consistent.

Seas and oceans are labeled similarly to mountain ranges. The text should spread out and the font size should be increased to serve as an indicator for the size of the body of water. Curve and rotate the text accordingly to fit the available area.

I have a preferred style for water labels.

Add Forests

Depending on the style of your map, adding forests and other vegetation may or may not be important. For the sake of the tutorial, I’m going to assume that it is.

Forests show up where trees can grow. This usually means “not in deserts or tundra or plains”. The world is filled with trees of all kinds: huge swaths of land are covered in them. Most places are actually forests (even cities: take a look the next time you’re in a plane). Even plains have forests or orchards. That said, not every forest should be shown on your map.

Add the forests that would be visible according to your scale. A general rule to follow is this: Only include a forest if it takes up more area than a full hex or space on your map.

Drawing Forests

Drawing forests is a big task that requires its own tutorial. Please jump out and read Creating Maps: Forests before continuing.

Labeling Forests

Forests are a natural phenomenon. Pick your font accordingly (see Natural vs. Created Elements). Labels for forests are centered and placed within the forest area itself. Depending on the font contrast, you may want to style them with a stroke or not.

Here are several examples of the same basic forest label style applied to multiple styles of forests. As you can see, it works better in some styles and not-so-great in others. Develop a label style that matches your map’s overall zeitgeist.

Add Verdancy

Verdant areas are places that have natural vegetation that isn’t a forest. Plains, grasslands – anywhere that isn’t a desert or too cold. You may or may not want to call them out – it’s your choice. Remember that everything on a map should serve a purpose. Verdant areas can only appear over landmass, so you’ll want to constrain them to the landmass itself.

You are going to paint verdancy in with the Brush tool.

You may ask yourself, “Self, why don’t I just select all the pixels in the Landmass area, fill it with a paintbucket, and then set the layer’s opacity to 20% or so?” and sure, you can do that, but you’ve now limited yourself to a maximum opacity of 20%, regardless of how thick or thin you want to make your verdant areas.

You may want to play around with the fill opacity of the Verdancy layer when you’re done. I like to apply a pattern overlay as well (the Noise – Seamless pattern at 50% opacity with an Overlay blend mode) but you do you.

Wait! There’s more! Depending on the blend modes you set for your forests, they may be picking up the color bleed from your verdant areas and are looking kind of weird or possibly even mottled. I have a solution for you: deleting the forest shapes.

Remember this trick for clearing verdant areas. You’ll repeat it over and over again, with roads, settlement icons, mountains, and other things.

Labeling Verdancy

Most of the time you won’t be labeling verdant areas. The exception is when the area is a well known plain or plateau or something similar.

Verdancies are a natural phenomenon. Pick your font accordingly (see Natural vs. Created Elements)). Labels for verdances can centered and placed within the verdancy area itself or they can be stretched and contorted (like labels for mountain ranges or seas). Depending on the font contrast, you may want to style them with a stroke or not.

Add Other Terrain

You will find that you may have additional terrain types that you need to call out, like deserts or tundra or badlands. These areas are drawn similarly to verdancy, but with a much higher opacity.

I’ll describe how to make a desert. The same technique works with all special terrain types; you just pick different patterns and effects in the end.

Now you’re going to want to add some styles to your desert because that looks janky.

There are lots of good seamless sand and desert textures you can find and use, of course. As with all patterns, some are better at certain scales than others. You can also create your own “stamp” patterns (see “Bonus Take: Patterning with Tree Stamps” in Drawing Forests for an idea of how to do this).

Labeling Other Terrain

Terrain types are a natural phenomenon. Pick your font accordingly (see Natural vs. Created Elements). Labels for these types can centered and placed within the area itself or they can be stretched and contorted (like labels for mountain ranges or seas). Depending on the font contrast, you may want to style them with a stroke or not.

Add Settlements

Settlements of any size need lots of things to survive, even in the most fantastic of worlds. The two most important things, however, are fresh water and a food supply. The absolute size of any settlement is going to be driven by the availability of these two things.

Water is the most important. The larger the population, the more water is required. It’s needed for drinking and for crops. It’s needed to power mills and transport goods.

Tiny villages (fewer than 50 people) can make due with a well to the groundwater. Small towns can survive with a few decent sized streams or a smallish river or fresh-water lake. Major cities (those with a population of 2000 or more) will need to be located on a large river or a large fresh-water lake – streams and wells will not cut it for that many people.

You can’t realistically plop a city of 7,000 people anywhere. It has to make sense.

Port cities will be near shipping lanes – usually on the outside edges, rather than inside deep or large bays.

Settlement Type Icons

Settlements need icons to show that they exist. Most often this is done with filled or styled circles. Region or nation capitols will often contain a star shape. This is the most simple way to handle this.

You can give each settlement a different icon depending on its basic type or size with a different icon treatment. I recommend placing these icons within a circle, however.

Some settlement types that might be distinguished using thier own icons:

• Capitol Cities
• Ports
• Small Villages
• Large Villages
• Walled Cities
• Mining Towns
• Lumber Towns
• Farming Villages
• Pirate Havens
• Ruins
• Other Points of Interest (temples, etc.)

Of course, you can always get fancy and give each city its own icon that represents it (a crest, perhaps) or even mark settlement locations with flags or other icons.

For each settlement icon, I highly recommend turning them into Smart Objects (see “Smart Objects” in Photoshop Basics for how to do this). Doing so will reduce your overall CPU usage and you’ll be able to make mass-edits easily.

Keep all your settlement icons in their own layer group called “Settlements”. Name each icon the same as its label. I recommend adding further groups as needed. For instance, if you have a lot of islands with a lot of towns, group them by island or perhaps by nation or state.

Make sure to keep a copy of each icon type if you want to include them in your Legend Key (see “Legends” in Fantasy Map Design Basics).

Labeling Settlements

Settlements are a created phenomenon. Pick your font accordingly (see Natural vs. Created Elements).

The placement of settlement labels should follow these rules:

• Settlement labels should never cross a shoreline, river, or boundary line.
  • If the boundary is to the left of the settlement, the label goes on the right.
  • If the boundary is to the right of the settlement, the label goes on the left.
• Settlement labels should most always be horizontal. Never curve a settlement name.
  • An exception is for highly detailed, zoomed maps where labels can be placed at angles if the situation requires it.
• For settlements inside the land, the label should be placed in the following order, given available space:
  • Top right, left aligned
  • Right, left aligned
  • Top left, left aligned
  • Bottom left, left aligned
  • Bottom left, right aligned
  • Left, right aligned
• For coastline settlements, the label should be located in the water, and to the top or bottom corner as makes sense given the coastline.

Add Roads

If your map is at a scale where roads would be visible, you’ll need to add them. This will be done with the Brush tool. I recommend using a pen tablet for this.

You may find that you can’t see your roads because they are obscured by other elements, such as forests or verdancy. The solution here is to delete the road’s shape from those layers (this is why I said to keep a “full” copy of each of your vegetation layers).

You’ll want to style your roads. I like to use a dark stroke (1 px inside, #222222, 70% opacity, with a Multiply blend mode) and a color overlay (#b2a685) set to Normal mode. You can experiment with patterns if you like but I don’t recommend it.

Roads that cross water will likely have bridges. You can draw a bridge and put it beneath the Roads layer if you like.

Labeling Roads

Roads are a created phenomenon. Pick your font accordingly (see Natural vs. Created Elements).

Like rivers, labels for roads are drawn along their paths. Use the Type tool options to spread the name of the road out and bend it to follow the roads’s path. There is no special information imparted by the direction of text with a road label (roads go both ways).

Roads are often labeled multiple times along their paths. When roads converge, they typically take the name of the larger, longer road in much the same way that rivers do.

Add Title, Scale Marker, and Legend

Make sure to add your title, scale marker, and legend as described in Fantasy Map Design Basics.

Finalization

There isn’t a lot of finalization to be done with outdoors maps. Mostly you will need to ensure that your layers are stacked correctly and that your scaling grid has the right type of effects, overlays, and transparencies to be pretty while still visible and not overpowering.

When you’re done, you’re on to Printing Maps.