For me, this whole process was exciting! Seeing your imagination come to life – turning the world in your head into something more tangible – it felt like a sneak-peek into what it might be like for an author to hold their bound, published book for the first time.

So begins the map-making tutorial!

Mapping out a fantasy world:

Step 1: Unceremoniously draw a map on some scrap paper. I drew mine in a spiral notebook. Author Holly Lisle does this, only she recommends you do this step with a pen. That way, any mistakes cannot be erased. The argument being ‘mistakes’ can become good world history or back-story, such as a sudden unnatural right angled jut in your river could have been man-made: Maybe the nobles redirected the water away from the poorer cities. Or maybe the poor people channeled the water away from the nobles! Maybe a tear in the paper could become a rift to another dimension. Maybe a coffee ring could become a land that has been cursed for centuries. Well, you get the idea. I was more concerned with approximate placements for cities, so I drew arrows with some paths some of my characters have taken. I also liberally X’d out parts I didn’t like.->

Step 2: Re-draw your map on similar paper based on what you learned. Try to make it a rough draft of your final product (try to make it look natural). A pencil and an eraser is highly recommended at this point.->

Step 3: Draw the outlines of your landmass(es) as large as you can on good sketchbook paper. I selected paper about the same size as my scanner bed, and drew on it using a mechanical pencil.->

Step 4: Draw terrain. Try to draw it lightly – preferrably lighter than the outline of the landmass(es). In fact, you may want to use a lighter-toned pencil entirely.
With my terrain I tried for an overhead 3-D effect, but simple upside-down V’s for mountains work just as well. Snaking lines coming off of mountains still work for rivers, and speckled dots still make great deserts.->

Really, at this point, you can just label your cities, maybe color it with colored pencils. The rest of the steps are going to be more about trying to make this map looking nice using digital rendering.

Step 5: Scan it at 200 DPI (or higher) and save it as a good, non-lossy format. I chose PNG, but BMP would have been another good choice.
JPG is an example of a lossy format: good for saving pictures to view later, but bad for pictures you want to work with digitally.
Whenever I have a drawing that is too big to scan, I take a photo of it with a 7.2 Megapixel digital camera and crop it – seems to work just as well.

Step 6: Open the file into your favorite image editing program. Some great ones out there are OpenCanvas, Adobe Photoshop, and The Gimp. I loaded mine into Adobe Photoshop CS2. There are actual map-making programs out there that use vectors, such as AutoREALM. Frankly, I wasn’t very impressed with them. At first, the fractal edges look impressive, but the end effect is a map that doesn’t look very organic.

Step 7: I’m going to assume you are using Adobe Photoshop or know your way around whichever program you are using at this point. Go to image->adjustments->brightness/contrast. Bring your brightness level to about -50 and your contrast level to about +50. You should start to notice your mechanical pencil lines will look more like they were done with an ink pen! Another great effect you get: the paper’s imperfections become magnified, giving it more of an old map look.->

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