Create An Illustrated Map Poster (For People Who Believe They Cannot Draw)

1. Introduction: I always thought that I cannot draw. While other form of art, It's like photography or music, came to me easily. Drawing was always a challenge. So last year when I decided to create a set of travel maps for photography blog, I had to come up with an easy process that will allow me to create this illustrations without too much free drawing. Hi, I'm George. Welcome to my class. I'm a lover of all forms of art. And since last year, an amateur illustrate. I did not study art and I'm not the professional illustrator. So my process, it's tailored towards people that have little experience with drawing, but who still want to create really cool stuff. Creating beautiful illustrations is not just for professionals, it can be for everyone. In this class. I will guide you through the process of creating a new map poster from the concept. The final exporting and sharing on social media and Skillshare will start with a small overview of the tools that we're going to use in Affinity Designer will then select our subject and our color scheme will start our drawing process by outlining the map, creating an illustration of a landmark, and adding the details to the poster. We will finish this class with a small lesson on exporting your work and sharing it on social media. So let's start by going over the details of this class project. 2. Class Project: For your class project, I would like you to create your own map post, select a location and the landmark, and using the tools that you are going to learn in this class, create your own unique piece of art. Do you need an application like Affinity Designer, Adobe Illustrator, or Procreate, or any other application that will allow you to work with layers. At the end of the course. Share your project with the other classmates on Skillshare. Don't forget to add a few words about why you chose your particular subject. And last but not least, use the other projects shared during this class as an inspiration for your future projects. Here is the list of steps that should help you with your class project. You will also find them all the details in the course description. First, you'll choose your place and landmark to 22nd, your select the color palette, and therefore, you'll draw your map outline in your program of choice forth. You'll draw that chosen. Then. You would add details to your Mac, like title and other small icons. And 6, you will export your drawing and I'll share it on Skillshare and social media to start creating a sense of community around this style of art, I encourage you to use the hashtag from the screen while sharing your work online. I am excited to show you my process. So let's get started. 3. Overview of Affinity Designer: The tools that we are going to use in this class, I will use the Affinity Designer, but similar tools and principles applied to other applications like Adobe Illustrator or Procreate. I also recommend you to learn the keyboard shortcuts in this will make your whole drawing process much faster. You can also find in the resource section of this course additional links to tutorials that can be useful for you. Let's start with the pen tool. You can either select it from the toolbar or press Tab key on your keyboard. To draw a line. Simply click in your document wherever you want to be. And in order to close the shape, simply go back to the first node. To select any shape that we have in our document, we can choose the move tool or simply press V on the keyboard. And this will allow us to move or resize the object. The twist selected. Let's delete this object. In order to draw curves. We have several options. Let's draw a line. And now selecting the note tool or press a on your keyboard, we have several options. Either we can just hover the pointer over the line, and then we can click and drag this line and create the curve that we want. Or we can draw another line. And then using the same node tool, we can simply click on the line to create an additional node and then convert this node to smoke. And then by dragging the note and the handles around the node, you can play around with a curve. Another option that we'll use quite often in this course is to use the smart mode. This sort of create automatically the curves for you based on the shape that you are going to draw. So in this case, you see that the curves are already created by the application and I don't have to add additional nodes, convert them to moles, and then play around with the curvature in order to stop drawing a line. So I'm going to draw something. And in order to stop drawing, you can simply press Escape. Otherwise, you will continue to create the curve. So if I press Escape, you see the note is de-selected. And now I can start a new line. We can also play around with the properties of a line. In this case, we can select a different color for the stroke. So let's select a blue color and we can change the width of the stroke. So let's say 1, or we can even make it much bigger. We can also play around with the properties of a shape. So in this case, we can create a shape. And we can control both the fill and the color of the stroke for this shape. Let's start with the fill. We can select any color we want to fill in the shape. And then for the outside, for the border. We can select the color from the stroke. I will select a green color. And then we can modify the width. And you can see we have a triangle field with yellow and green mortar. You can also select the colors from the color panel. The front full circle is the fill area. So if I'm going to select it, I can change the color. And in order to change the color of the stroke, simply go to the donut shaped form and then select the color from the color palette. We can also drop pre-defined shapes. In this case, I will draw square. In order to draw a perfect square or a perfect circle. Just press the Shift key and then just drag the cursor until you create a shape. We can also use the node tool that we discussed earlier to manipulate the shape of this form. But in order to do that, we need to first convert to shape two curves. And now if we select the node tool, you can see that we can easily add notes and manipulate the form. Within the node tool. You can also select multiple notes at once. And you can even convert them to smooth. And this will create a smoother curve in this area. Let's talk now a little bit about adding or subtracting shapes from one another. Let's assume we want to create a symmetric object. And we have two options. One option is to try and create the object manually, the full object. And I will just fill it so you can see it better. Or another option is to create just halftone object. Then we are going to duplicate the object by pressing Control J on the keyboard. We're going to flip the object horizontally. And now drag it like this. In order to create just one shape from the two layers that are created, we can select both layers and choose the option from the top bar. And as you can see, this created one layer. Now we have one symmetric. Let's discuss another useful option, that subtract option. And this will be very useful. One u1 to create, for example, windows or doors in our buildings. Let's assume that blue rectangle is our warm. And then I'm going to create another rectangle that will be our dorm. And now making sure that the layer I want to subtract is on the top. I can select both layers and place Subtract button. And as you can see, the door is now removed from the shape. Andrew, if you have a shape that we want, I will show you now how to use a very powerful tool, the power of duplicate. I will create a simple form. And then I can duplicate this object by keeping down the Alt key and dragging the object. Also rotate it empty. Now, if I continue to duplicate this object using the Control J, the keyboard, you can see that the object maintains the same transformation as the initial one, and this will make it very easy to create patterns. One last thing that I would like to show you is how to draw inside the shape. Draw a line. This will be very useful. One we have to draw or reverse inside the boundaries of our outline map. In order to constrain the line inside the rectangle, we have two options. One option is to drag the curve layer under the rectangle layer. But not until you have the full line, but move it slightly to the right until you see the curve layer is nested under the rectangle. And as you can see, everything it's nested inside the initial rectangle that neutral. The second option is to replicate the rectangle and drag the rectangle layer until you saw a vertical light blue shape on the curve layer. And this will apply it the rectangle mask on our shapes. There will be additional links in the resource section of this course if you want to learn more about Affinity Designer. For now, let's start with our project. 4. Choose a Subject: Now that we have an overview of the tools that we'll use in this course. Let's start with the actual work on our project. As a first step, we'll choose a destination and the landmark that we are going to drop. Think about your favorite travel destination, or maybe just your hometown could also be a great choice. Let's move to Google Maps for our first step and select the area that we are going to draw for this project. I'm going to choose Venice in Italy. As you can see, the whole Venice region, it's quite big. And I would like to have just a small part of it on my map. So I'm going to zoom in to the old city. And most probably this will be the outline of my map. In order to bring this to Affinity Designer, I will just take a screenshot. This will add the screenshot to the clipboard. And if I go to Affinity Designer and paste, you can see the image here. Now that we have a location, let's select the landmark that all add to our map. And if case of Venice, I have several options from the Rialto Bridge to a gondola or St. Mark's Basilica. But for this class, I will choose the Rialto Bridge to show you a different tips that you can use during the drawing. So let's find an image for the breach. Harold prefer a frontal image of the bridge without too much perspective because that'll make it much easier to draw. So I'm looking to something like this. But maybe in the daylight. Yeah, I think characters, this image to bring it into the Affinity Designer, copy the image. Go to Affinity Designer and just paste the image into your document. Don't worry about placing the images now, we just want to have everything in Affinity Design. We might also choose to add some details to your map. And for this purpose, I'm going to look for. So let's select this one. Again, copy image, and bring telling me to Affinity Design. Now that we have our subject, Let's select a color scheme for our project. 5. Choose a Color Scheme: In this short video, we are going to choose the color scheme for our map. We can either get inspired by one of Venice photos that you can find online or we can create from scratch a color scheme. And I will show you both options to start with. I would like to use for my project some colors that I can find them images of Venice. And for this reason, I will search for Venice travel photography on Google. And I would like some mutate more pastel colors. So probably I will choose an image like this. And now I'll show you how we can get the color scheme out of this image. We can go to a website like colors, where we can generate different color schemes. And we have an option to generate the colors came from one of the photos. We are going to pass tiered URL. So we can right-click on the image, select copy image address, and then paste the URL in the color application press Okay. And now you can see we can choose different colors from our photos. So I would like light color for the background of the map. Probably a gray and something darker. Mark and the texts. So let's choose maybe some brown. And we can leave this one. Select the color of the sky, orange from the building. And let's also having the skin, the color of top. So what we can do now is press next, opening the generator, and we can see the color scheme that we created from the image. And this point you can export to an image. Let's give it a title, king. And we can bring this image into Affinity Designer. You can also create your own colors came from scratch. Using this website, you can simply press Space key on the keyboard and you randomly generated different color schemes. You also have the options to lock specific colors. So let's say you like this particular red, we can lock it and continue to generate colors around this red. So we'll look at another one. And let's say we also like this blue bottle, like a slightly lighter version of this blue. We can choose the option and you can choose the shape that you'd like to have. And you can continue this until you have the color scheme that you want. And then, as in the previous example, you can export it and bring it into the Affinity Design. Now that we have our color scheme, Let's add this color to Affinity Designer to make them easier to use in the future. We'll go to the swatch panel if you don't see it. And simply go to the View menu and select the swatches panel. So what we are going to do is create a new swatch, add an application palette. And we're going to pick the colors from our color scheme. We can use the color picker. Select a color. And using this button, we can add current fill to palette. Let's do the same with all the colors. And now that we have our images and our color scheme, Let's start working on. 6. Outline The Map: Welcome back. In this video, we will start creating the outline of our map. First, let's create our background. I will create a rectangle, the size of the document. And I will fill it with one of the colors that we selected previously. In this case, the gray color. I would make it light term. And like we did in the previous video, we can add this color to the swatch so it will be easier to access later on. Let's rename it to the ground. And I already know the product, the land part. I like to use the same color, just slightly darker. So we'll go to the color. Make it slightly darker, added to the sludge list and rename it as well. So let's select the background color for our background and move it under Thomas. To create the outline on the map, we are going to use the pen tool and directors to smart mode. And to make it more visible, I will choose a dark color for the stroke. We can change it later on. I also mean and we can start tracing. Don't worry, you don't have to be extremely precise. We cannot. Some adjustments later. Remember, in order to close the shape, just click on the initial. Next. We're going to make some small adjustments to the map. And for this tool and tried to strengthen some of the notes. So I can select a note and then convert to shock. And I will talk this all at older map whatever necessary. And now let's do the same for the smaller one. Select again the pen tool in the smart molt and alkaline the islands. Let's adjust. Some cannot. Now, let's fill the map with the color of the length on the swatch. Let's print everything together. And if we remove the image, we can see now how the map looks like. Let's remove the stroke. And this is the outline of our map. Let's create only one shape from all the layers. We are going to select all the layers and builds up option. And mountain the length is in a timeline. Let's start drawing the commands. For this. I'm going to make the image visible again. I'll change the visibility to multiply two, it will be easier to see what we are running. And we are going to use two options for drawing the canal. What are the big ones? I'm going to trace it similar to what I did with the length. And I'm going to fill them with the color of the background. For the small ones, I'm going to use just simple lines. And the stroke would be the color of tobacco. Tweets. Will work on the big come up. So I will select the Pen tool. I will select the game or dark color, so it will make it easier to see. And let's start working on the columns. Don't forget to save your map from time to time. By pressing Control S on your keyboard. Don't be afraid to overlap the shapes since we are going to remove the stroke and fill the shapes of the canal with the same color. So the overlapping could not be visible. Okay, this should be enough. Let's add up all the layers in one group and remove the stroke. So we make sure the doughnut shape is selected. And Christa, remove Stroke option and then moving to the field or fill it with a background color. And the preheat the image. This is how our map looks like. We can also take a look and make sure that everything gets closed properly. For example, here, I don't think I'm the next step is to create the small canals using simple strokes. So that dilutes the pen tool. Change again, the stroke color to something darker so that will be easier to see what we are trying. And let's start drawing the remaining of the columns. In order to create different shapes of the canals. I will use the same smoke, smoke, and I will also play around with the width of the stroke. Don't forget to stop drawing a line, just press Escape on the keyboard. I will draw first of all, the canals to pollute require a width of two. And after that I will draw that Kellogg's that will be smaller. Okay, I think we are done. Let's select all the layers and add them to one group. Let's add the map. And for this group, Let's change the stroke to the background color. And as you can see, we have a nice map layout including the canal. You can do something similar for the road. As you can see here on a map I did for Vienna. For the Daniel prefer, I use the tracing option and fill the river with a background color. And for the road, I use different width of the lines to create the main dots and the secondary roads and fill them with a slightly darker color. So you can do the same for your map in case you don't choose to do Venice Canal, for example. As the last step. I would like to refine the map a little bit and maybe add some bridges wherever necessary. First, any mistakes when I draw the lines and I'm looking at, especially for places where the lines overlap each other and make sure they're nicely overlapping. I will do this using the Node tool. And in order to select the line, double-click on the line with the node tool. And then we can move the notes around. I think this looks good. And then let's draw some breaches. Make the map visible again. And in these places, I would like to add the bridges in the color of talent. And I'll print them on top of my canal channels. In order to move a document around, press the space key, and drag a document with a mouse. Group, all the lines in their own group. And let's hide the image. And now you can see the bridges and the details that we added to them. In the next video, we are going to draw a simple object by using the same tracing method that you use for the map hotline. 7. Drawing a Simple Object: Welcome back. In this video, we're going to draw a simple object by using the tracing method that we discussed before. I'm going to select the layers that are already draw and lock them using tech lock options. So when I draw the objects, I don't accidentally move this layers. So let's start drawing our simple object. In this case it will be testicle. Select the layer, change. The blending mode to multiply and using the pen tool. A dark stroke color. Let's trace to object. Now using the Node Tool. I'm going to adjust a little bit to tracing. We are going to fill the object with white and stroke. It can leave the cycle as it is. Or we cannot delete a bit of color to it. By adding some detects. I'm going to fill it with a darker color. The image. Let's group all the layers. So this is our simple object. Using the same method, you can draw almost anything. As an example, you can see here several objects that I drove for other maps. They're all drawn using the tracing of images found on cooking. Now that you know how to draw a simple object, Let's use the same principles and draw our main landmark. 8. Drawing The Landmark: We will start drawing out of many landmark, in my case, the real tablet. We will apply different techniques that we learned in the overview of Affinity Designer video. I'm going to draw just half of the bridge, then duplicated, flip it horizontally, and then combine the two layers into the final bridge. We will also use the power of duplicate feature to draw the windows that you see here. And a few techniques for adding and subtracting the shapes. So let's start with drawing. I like to start with the general shape of the land market. I'm going to draw. So using the pen tool. And I'm going to start drawing half of the bridge. And I'm going to fill it with one of the colors that we chose from our Venice photon. So this will be our base. Next, let's remove the part under the bridge. Credential. Go back to the pen tool. You can use the snipping tool for more precise placing of the nodes. Here. And using the Node Tool, I'm going to create the curb and select the two layers making short-term objectives on the top. And then use the subtract option. Let's create now the shadow under the WH. Again using the pen tool and cannot turn to create a curvature for the shadows. And it looks the same color, just like the dark. And this is our shape. Make some small adjustments to remove the white part. Next, I will create the middle of the bridge. And again, I'm going to use the subtract method. These two shapes. Then again, subtract option to throw the shadow. Next I'm going to create the windows. I'm going to draw a rectangle. And the circle combined the two objects. And let's align this with the stairs. And what we can do now is use the power duplicate. Duplicate this layer. We use the Control J shortcut and then move to shape the second window. I will pick continued press Control J. You can see that the windows follow the same transformation. They will just need to be adjusted slightly. Credit. So this is how our bridge looks of fun. I will group everything. Next. We are going to add the small details to WHO. I will start. Audit toward that. Don't worry about the liar to think out of the main shape here, will take care of this a little bit later. Let's continue with the roof. Okay. Let's add the urine and look. Let's select all the lines that we created, including the one from here. Let's go parasitic. And now the constraint is lines inside the main four written duplicate the main shape. And then I'm going to direct a second shape on top of the group until you see the vertical blue rectangle. It looks like we've missed one of the lines. So let's move to the group. And now, as you can see, all the lines soft constraint inside the shapes. Next, I'm going to draw a stairs. And for this, I will draw lines in between the stairs, but make sure I'm going to use the same height. I will just duplicate the first one. Here using the Alt key. Just drag and drop. And then Control J. Duplicate the line current from group all of them. Let's see how that looks like. And then I'll continue doing the same for the rest of the stairs. To grow this thing using Alt key. I'm going to duplicate it. Control J. I'm going to create serverless databases. Now we'll just have to adjust them the line with the windows. To make it easier. I'm going to draw a line at the base of the windows and move it down using the arrow keys. And then as it kind of written or just the shadows. Let's walk this line. Let's go to this line and bring them into the group that has the mask of the main shape. So in this case, there will be constrained to domain shape limits and would like to add just a few more details. And these two lines here should also other group. And one last thing that I would like to do is to have the windows actually cut off from the main form and not in the shadow color. So what I'm going to do, move this window shapes on top of the main shape. And then selecting all of them. I can press the Subtract button just make sure that the main shape is the last layer in the selection. And then pressing substruct, I can remove all of them at once from the main shape. And let's just add an additional line for the stairs. Maybe maybe more like it. I think half of the bridge is ready. I'm not going to work. Tails 38. Make sure everything gets on that one group. Would like to make a small correction here because the shapes might not match properly and I'm going to duplicate them. We had done the top of the bridge. Let's duplicate this. We're going to flip it horizontally and then keeping the Shift key pressed. And I'm going to remove the object until the two halves combined. And I will group everything together, the bridge into one group. And this is our final landmark. The next lesson, we are going to bring everything together and build the final poster. 9. Finalize The Poster: Drawing done. Let's put everything together and finalize the map. I'm going to make visible the layers, our pitch, it's thicker. That's also good. And I'm also going to help compost. If you wanted to learn how to draw this compost, you can check the bonus video in this class took place. And the right coordinate down go imbalance this equal to 0 from the left side. And now let's add a title to our map. For today's am going to use Google to search for some font combinations. And for my map. I'd like to use maybe this combination, the Grade 5s formed and the parietal waveform. So going back to the designer, It's grab the text tool. And let's look for great wipes. Okay, Let's make it bigger. And let's use the dark brown color that we extracted from the Venice photo center, the title. And they'll go to the country. In this case. Reported this URL. Use the other form, the railway font, keyboards, beaker. Make it bold. And I would like to add the little bit of space between the letters for today is we'll go to the Character panel. You can also open it, The clicking this button here. And using the thread kink optional, I helped some spacing between the electrodes to a 100 should refind. Same color that we used before it, Kodachrome, simpler. Life queued up. Put the bridge. And I think that's our final poster. Well then next to veto it, I will show you how to export this image, either photo printing or for social media. 10. Exporting Your Poster: Exporting the image and showing the choline and the beginning of the project to set up the document to the A3 format and the portrait mode. And this is suitable for any printing that you'd like to do. If you want to create your map in a different size or a different rotation of the paper. You can easily do that through the document setup. In order to export your image, go to File Export. And you have different options of export kangaroo image. In general, we are going to export a JPEG. You can keep the size. You can increase the quality as much as you'd like, and then simply press Export. And we'll get the option to save the image. If you'd like to share your work on Instagram, I can show you a way to create the map in a different sides, because Instagram uses a four by five image format. So in order to do that easily, we can use the Artboard Tool. And this creates an app court or kind of a document inside the document for our map. And now we can create an additional art board. And let's give it four by five ratio. So maybe 200 to a 150. Non-recurring resizes. Keeping down the Shift key. It'll resize keeping the same ratio. Now, we can copy the layers that we want to bring to this new artboard and add them to the artwork. And now we can easily adjust everything for the new document ratio. Let's make a little bit smaller. Look, put a compass and the background. And now we have exactly the same map in the four by five format that is used by Instagram. And we can export the same as before. In the area, we can choose what our board to export or the whole document. In this case, the artboard tool. In general, instagram is using photos Qatar, One 80 pixels in width. So we can't resize that can mean came to 90 quality. And then export Ptolemy for Instagram. Now that you have your poster exported, feel free to share it on Skillshare, in the project area or on any other social media channel that you prefer. 11. Final Thoughts: Well done. You've reached the end of this class. By now, you should know how to create an outline of a map. Create your own landmark illustration, and put everything together in a nice and beautiful poster. And this is only the beginning. Using the tools that they've had learned in this class. You can use your imagination and create even more detailed maps and post-docs. Don't forget to post your project on Skillshare. Once it's written, I will be there to provide your feedback. And if you want, you can also share your project on social media and use the hashtag below to make it easier for other classmates to find your project. I hope you enjoyed the class and I'm looking forward to see your illustration. And remember, we all have our own set of tenants. We just need the right tools and processes to make good use of them. So have fun and see you soon. 12. Bonus Creating a compass: Welcome back. In this short bonus video, I'm going to show you how to draw the compass that you saw in the export medium. To start, the compass will use a double star tool. Kit down the Shift key and create a shape, change the number of points to four. And then morphing red points, you can adjust the shape. I can click this wrong color. Same for the stroke. Maybe I'll increase the stroke to one. And now let's draw the inside triangles. For this earliest a triangle term. Make sure that top point is set to 0. And let's create a triangle from the top of the star until the base of the small triangle. Let's fill it with white. And then convert the triangle two curves. And using the Node tool, drag this corner until the center of the star. Now, we'll duplicate this triangle using the Control J. And we can use the transform panel to rotate this triangle. I'm going to rotate it on the left down corner, which is the center of my star. And her loose the rotation 90 degrees. And then if I continue to press Control J, to duplicate the triangle, we're going to use the same method. The small triangles, to make it easier and will rotate 45 degrees. The whole shape using the center is the base of rotation. And let's draw the triangles here, same as before. Convert to curves. Drag the center. Now, let's duplicate this triangle using Control J. And using the same method as before, rotate this triangle 90 degrees, press two more times, Control J, and we have all the triangles stamp. Now, let's select everything and rotate around the center. 45 degrees back to where we start. Let's add a little bit more details to the compass. For this, I'll use the doughnut stall. Again, press down the Shift key and throat autonomy. And using a red dot, we can adjust the width of the Tanakh. And let's center it. It to make it easier to work with. And let's print this tunneled under the star. And then I can create an internal circle using again Control J. In this time, you can keep down the control and the Shift key and drag the mouse. And this will modify the object constraint to the center. Now, using cannot touring has struck the red note. And I would like to have some spikes inside the terminal donor. For this, I'm going to use the Pen tool. Let's draw a vertical line here. Then using Control J. To duplicate this line. Select the bottom note from the transformation and insert 15 degrees. And then continue to press Control J until we come back to the initial line. So as you see, we are back to where we started and recreated the spikes. Let's group them all in one layer and bring them behind the star. And now I would like to contain these lines, the spikes inside the internal donut. To do this, I will just drag Music Group and the terminal turnip layer slightly to the right, so nested under the doughnut layer. And as you can see, the lines that now restrained inside this donut shape. If you want, you can also add the cardinal points using the text tool. Everything together. If you want to have this shape available for all your maps, you can select everything, go to the Assets tab, and you can use the option, go up from selection inside the assets. And this will create for you an asset that is available across all the documents in Affinity Design. So let's delete this layer, for example, from the document. Let's make our layers visible again. And now let's up the compass that we created. If we go to Assets, you can see the compass here. We can drag it into the document and then resize it to the size that we need it and place it on the map. And that's how you can grow the company. I hope you enjoyed this video and thanks again for checking my class.