I posted up a new map over at my sketchblog a few minutes ago, including some work-in-progress shots. I did it old school, with a nib pen and watercolors. (Well, watercolor pencils, so not THAT old school I guess.) Unfortunately my scanner does a pretty terrible job of capturing watercolors, so you’ll have to rely on some photos!
Sorry it’s been so long since I put up a new episode, folks. It’s been crazy at Casa del Zombie.
The map pack I’m working on is a collection of 10 generic town and village maps. The maps are all completely unlabeled – no compass rose even! – and are presented as high-res JPG’s. You’ll be able to print them out, edit, and label them however you want to suit your campaign.
If you’re shopping around for an older, less expensive version of Photoshop, version 7 is the oldest I’d recommend. It’s a real watershed in the development of the program; 7.0 introduced the new brush engine, which – as you can see from this episode – is almost worth the price of admission all on it’s own.
Even if you have a Wacom tablet, this is still a useful technique to learn. Drawing all those ridge lines over and over again, I would’ve ended up with some serious carpal tunnel syndrome doing it the old fashioned way!
I’ve set up a Picasa Web Gallery for my cartography work; hard to pass up that gigabyte of free storage! I’ve also added a WordPress widget to display a few thumbnails. Clicking on them will take you directly to the Picasa page for that particular map. You might spot a duplicate map in the thumbnails for the next couple of days, but as I get around to uploading more maps, those should happen a lot less often.
I usually have each episode at least partially scripted out. I’ll typically write out the opening, the closing, and any bits in the middle where I want to make sure I don’t forget a step or (more often) if I just hit a section that doesn’t sound right off the cuff. This one’s completely off the top of my head, and except for a couple of edits where I completely fumbled a phrase or had a particularly long pause to think about what I was going to say, it’s the first take. Not too shabby, although I wish I’d mentioned that I’d turned down the opacity of my brush earlier.
Speaking of brushes, just about any brush that’s got some texture and slightly roughened edges will work for this. Try out several and find one you like; the watercolor brushes are an obvious choice, of course, but you can get some interesting effects with others as well!
There’s one more step to these mountains, by the way; in the original map, if you look closely you’ll see that the mountains have snow-covered tops. I’ll cover that next episode.
