Creating Fantasy Maps with Natural Texture (Using Adobe Photoshop)

1. Introduction: Hi there, Welcome to my class about creating fantasy maps with natural textures. Today we are going to be going through a Adobe Photoshop tutorial. So you'll need to have that software, or if you are familiar with software that does similar things to what I'm going to be demonstrating by all means, use what you have available. I'm a storyteller. I love creating stories and making maps has been something that I've always enjoyed. That love of maps has stemmed from my first experiences with classic fantasy stories like JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit, where you flip open that first page and you see the map and it brings your imagination to life. I love creating my own style of map. It's a little bit different. I like using natural textures and so I'm going to introduce you to my method and my style. It's going to look something like you see here. It's not your ink, black and white. Black on paper style of map. I'm gonna be showing you how to use photography, actual photos of grass, trees, vegetation, stone formations, and water textures to create the textures that you're going to see on the land and sea. I encourage you to open up your software and follow along. I will be demonstrating my process of creating map outlines, creating the lakes and rivers, applying textures using clone stamping, creating mountains, trees, roads, applying labels to everything that's on your map. Plus a few extra details that show you options of different color choices or alternate styles. And those styles might look like this. You can dramatically alter your map once you get the foundation in digital format, you can begin to play with color layers and flipping textures around. You can come up with a dramatically different look based on what we create. So just so you know, your map doesn't have to look identical to mine. You can play around with it, adjust it to your own preference and taste. You'll want to take a look in the description. I'm going to point you to some assets where you can find some textures. I have been using free textures from websites like unsplash.com. You might have a particular style of tree. From an aerial view. You'll need to find aerial photos of these various landforms, textures, natural things that you can apply in your map. I'll give you some links below in the description. I also do you stock photography from websites like Adobe.com where they have great stock photography options. So that's something that you'll need to figure out. Again, my name is James Prozac. I am a professional designer and illustrator. I love making stories. I've been doing this since childhood. Creating, illustrating. My style has evolved and changed. I loved doing things that involve imagination. And you'll see that in the style of the things that I do. I love color and that's why my maps probably reflect that tendency towards colorful creations like this. This is a fairly long tutorial, so you're going to need to find a little bit of time, but let's get started. 2. Drawing the Map Outline: So here we go naturally, we are going to be starting with the base color for the ocean, which will be the backdrop alarm happens using the polygon lasso tool. So it's all straight edges. As I begin to draw the land sources, I would recommend drawing this out on paper first, you might scan it in. And so you're tracing the map. First. For me. I'm just going to freehand this because I'm just doing this from my imagination. I don't even know what the land sources are getting. The land formations are going to look like. But if you are basing this on a storyline, some kind of theme that you're going with. Maybe you have a map planned out already that you're trying to produce digitally. And so sketch it out. And then as you're going through this, you're not just free handing this like I'm doing. And you know exactly where the coastlines should lay, where the islands will be, where the dips and the peninsulas and all those things. It's land formations or they're very, very organic. They need to feel organic. You don't want to have long straight edges. Probably. Just got to think about the coastlines where there's gonna be things jutting in and out where the water might come in a little bit further. For me, I'm just doing this style of map where you're not seeing the entire world. You're just seeing perhaps a section of the world that are storyline will isolate. If you're doing a full world, obviously you probably wouldn't want to go right to the edge. I'm filling this in now, it's just a green color. I created a new layer. I filled it with a base green color can change depending on the color contrast that you want between the land and the sea. That stuff will evolve and we'll get into that a little later. Now, I'm going to go into a little bit more details and then just a pinch. And we're using our Lasso tool to select an island. We're going to fill this into with the color that we selected. You can get as detailed as you want. It depends on how many islands you want. This can be a lengthy process. This could be a simple process. In general. I like to I'd like to make sure that there's a fair amount of islands surrounding. It's kind of more realism. Feels more natural and organic to include a variety of islands. Okay, So now you notice here there's some sharp edges. And those sharp edges, again, I like things to be a little bit organic. So you typically wouldn't see like a box at the end of land formation. And so I pull up my Erase tool when I get to a certain stage. And I just began to clip off the sharp corners. And sometimes I might even do a little bit of a jagged. Use my eraser and you know, like jump in a little bit. It's all very organic. There's no rhyme or reason sometimes unless you have very specific things that you want to do, you're just kind of feeling it out as you go. I'm going to pull off recording this section right away. I'm going to get into rivers and streams. As I'm doing this, you're going to see how the opportunity now comes in where you can start building in the inlets, end, lakes and streams that go inland. And it kinda goes hand in hand with this. 3. Lakes & Rivers: Again, we're just working along the coastlines were just softening edges. This is where we left off in the last video. You're creating kind of a jagged dynamic around the edges. But now you wanna go inland and create some rivers and streams. And this is, there's multiple ways of doing this. I like to use the eraser tool just to kinda work your way in. You have to make sure you have enough pressure to try to not leave little stray points. You'll see why from my technique a little bit later because I'd like to apply outlines. If you have little stray points, they're going to show up a little bit later. So make sure you're pressing fairly hard. Try and do it as confident, as competently as you can. And you're trying to create dynamic feeling. So no straight lines are trying to avoid straight lines. It helps to look at references of real maps so you have a sense of the shape of lakes and water forms. But this is very forgiving. You can be very creative. I tend to plot these things O2 specifically, I just kinda go with the feel of it. As you're looking at the shapes take take place as it's unfolding right in front of you. You're just like, Oh, I think I'll turn left hero. I'll make it extend this way. We'll have a curve in the river over here and you can think of winding river. So some of them might be a little bit more straight. Some of them will curve like this. It's a winding river and that's just the way that the geography tends to occur in nature. So try and mimic that as best you can. You know, big lakes, lakes. Not every lake has to have a river water source, but I like to do that. I tend to like to have it connect to the ocean. Let's just my way. There might be multiple ways into a lake or water form. You can play with that a little bit. There can be different widths. Some might be very wide, some might be very thin. There can be a fork in the river like that. So it's water source is coming from multiple places leading to a lake. There could be an inlet coming from one side, one coming from the other. You could even leave little islands in the middle of a river and that's up to you. You can get rid of them if you don't want that. I'm going through here, I'm going to soften some of the corners again. I didn't do that throughout the whole map, but just play around with that soften edges, create a more organic coastline. Make sure to use a not an airbrush when you're doing that because you don't want to get really soft on the edges. You want to have kind of a solid edge. So I'm using kind of a diamond shape. Brush at the moment. Again, I tend to not overthink this so long as it looks natural. That's kind of my my thought. You can see I got a little bit thin on the pressure on that particular stroke. That's something I'll have to go back and fix. Again that comes into play later when I tried to apply a stroke outline to my what my island shape. I'm just trying to clear that out a little bit. I'll probably have to clean it up a little bit later. Alright, You get the idea. I'm going to speed up the video here and we'll get to the end of this. Alright, As we just tidy up the last bits of the water and river structures on the map. We're going to be heading into doing textures in the next video. And that's where we begin to kind of give a little bit more dynamic to the map and the land structures and all of that. 4. Applying Grass Texture: Okay, so we're gonna do something a little bit more technical here. You have to bear with me. So what I'm doing is I'm creating a folder in which I'm going to put my land structure. I want to create a mask because I want to contain everything that I do within the land structure to protect it from bleeding over the edges. We're gonna be applying texture to the landmass as well. So you're going to see a couple of things take place here in this next section. Right now I'm taking a look at my pattern panel. You can open that up in the Windows section of your main menu if you don't see it here. And you want to make sure that you can see your thumbnail is pretty good. You can see there's already some default things in here, but you can also import certain textures. So there's some grass in here, there's gonna be some leaves, none of these the grasses, okay, I think we might be able to use some of those. I've already imported some things myself, but we'll take a look and see if we can bring in a couple more things. It's good to have seamless textures so you can find them on websites like Unsplash. You can purchase them. And so I'm in Photoshop. This isn't a separate Photoshop document. This is a texture that I found. I'm not sure if I purchased this one or not. There's a lot of free textures online. But you, you can take this and you can go up and save this. I don t think this is a seamless one. So we're going to see what happens if it's not seamless. Because you'll, you'll, you'll see the edges when you bring it into the, into the map that we've created. And what you wanna do is try to prevent the edges from showing. Otherwise it's going to look a little bit messy when you're when you're in your other documents. So what we're going to go up to as the menu under Image, There are under Edit, Define pattern. When you select Define pattern, you can name the pattern that you created. And all you're doing is you're, you're, you open up your texture. And what's going to happen is whatever is on your Canvas at the moment is gonna become a texture. This is opened to this. You can see in my, you can see in my pattern palette toolkit that pattern appeared once I define the pattern, I can drag it to the area I want. So I want to do it in with the other grass elements. Now I'm going back to my map. And I've selected that layer and if I just click, it, converts the entire background to that grass texture. So we saw that one that I just brought in. It had kind of a you can see here, you can see the edges. I don't like the look of that. You want a seamless texture like this one. The next thing that we're going to do is to create a mask for the layer in which all the land masses and the textures will be contained within. And so right now, we are going to do a selection of the land layer. And we're going to apply that to the entire folder. We start off by selecting the folder. We hold down the Control key, we click on the land layer, it creates the outline. We go down to the masking tool at the bottom, and there we have a mask applied to that entire folder. So now anything that we add within when we start coloring and adding some dynamic textures, it's all gonna be contained within that. We'll do the water separately on a different layer when we begin working around the edges and that sort of thing. So that's it for this section. The next section we're actually going to begin colorizing the grass that we just laid down and we'll make it more dynamic. 5. Colorizing & Depth: So what we're doing here is creating a color layer in which the color settings for that layer, the overlay is going to be a color layer. And once you set that, you select a color that you want, now, just imagine you're going to be applying some color to the general grass. This the texture that's underneath it. So grasses and all uniformly green, you might have different tones of green, you might have dead grass, you might have just different tones. Dry areas, more lush areas. And so here I'm selecting a, I'm going to call it a dead grass. It's kind of a brown grass coloration and it's going to give a little bit more dynamic to the kinda general green, lush look. So as I zoom out a little bit, and that's going to allow me to see a broad, you can zoom in and you can get really detailed. But seeing it on a broad view is probably more ideal for doing this kind of coloration. And you're just kind of glazing over the areas of the map amino and my mind, I'm thinking north-south. I'm thinking probably more on the south side. We're, you know, I don't, I don't see an equator on here, but South tends to be dryer, more desert-like. So that's the general feel that I'm gonna go four, you get down south. This is mean you can't dance along the edges in various places. There's no rules. You're just making this up as you go. But here we're going to, we're going to try to introduce this dual tone. And that'll help to give a little bit more dynamic to the grass, a little more realistic, a little bit more texture than the flat. Now, after you do that, we might want to introduce some kinda depth to the, to the map. Right now it's very flat. You're not seeing any indication of valley and height. We have no mountainous areas defined. So what I've done is created two layers. One is going to be a shadow layer, which is what I'm on right now. And one will be a highlight layer. The shadow layer should have a multiply. I'm going to try using a multiply overlay. And then the next one, it's going to be a screen overlay. And that's gonna give you the multiply will darken areas and the screen will highlight and lighten areas. So we're on the shadow layer right now, and it's overlaying the color at the moment. I think we might switch that around so that you're applying the color to the shadow. And I'm gonna do the same thing like when I was coloring. Yeah, here we will move the wall, moves the colors color to the top because that'll allow their color layer to influence the shadows. Much like when applying the color though, we're just gonna go kind of an overview and begin to lay in some shadowing. I'm using a dark green color. I'm kinda to mimic the because it's generally going to be overlaying the grass. You're mimicking the grass color and thinking about a shadow side. You also have to think about there being a light source. So from the way that I'm doing this, I'm imagining the light coming from the right side of the map. So anything that's on the left side will be in the shadow areas. It doesn't mean you have to stick strictly to that. This isn't like a general painting, but it'll give you more of a consistent feel if you're sticking to the light source. I'm just going to dance around the map. And you're gonna begin to see depth will begin to happen in various areas and you might have to refine it. You might have to lighten the darkness or lightness of this. You might be laying it down and think, oh, that's a little too dark. It's a little bit too much shadow. And if you think of it this way to, the more shadow, the more you're implying depth and the more sharp the incline. If I get really dark in certain areas, it's going to indicate that there's a lot more height. I'm reversing now I'm on the highlight layer and we're overlaying with the screen. And I've picked a lighter green again, because now we're thinking in terms of light source, this is going to be the lighter side of the contour and we're laying on the right side of these hills. So on the left side of the ridge, it'll be dark. On the right side where the light is hitting, it will be lighter. And that's what's going to give you your three-dimension. Just dancing around. I like to when I get into the river areas, I'm thinking river tends to be in lowland. It's a bit of a valley, so I'm just it's just my way of doing it as you're kind of following the river. And by lightning it you're making it indicate like it's at a lower spot. You don't have to do that. That's just a technique that I do. Also, the more fine, more fine detail do you make your, your ridge lines in terms of brightness and shadow? It's also going to, it's going to imply sharpness of slope. If you really spread things out or if you use a wide brush, it's going to, the detail is less fine. You notice in the bottom areas, it feels a lot softer. And if I, if I draw a sharper line like I'm doing here, It's going to, it's going to imply kind of a steeper slope. So that felt a little bit too sharp for me, so I lightened it a little bit. All of this. You just have to have it in your mind where you think there might be hills and valleys and that sort of thing. And that's all you're doing is you're just there's no right or wrong. It's all where you want the hills to be. Again, we're following kind of a valley where the rivers are running. So just in this process of adding the color and adding the dark multiply layer and the brighter highlights screened layer, you're getting a lot of dynamic. And just by flipping on and off the color, you can see the dynamic all on its own just with the grass. That might influence how dark or light you want to make the color layer over top, you might really like that green looking for me, I'm actually beginning to lighten the color because I just really liked the look of the green itself. So just, I'm, I'm taking an eraser. Um, I'm not fully erasing, I'm leaving a little bit of tone there, but just pulling back the color, just a pinch. Again, totally taste and preference. Little bit of shadow on the top islands and there's a few other islands which I may get to later. I don't know if I'll do it. All right Now, again, this is something that you can also do right along the coast. If you add shadowing that, you might be implying that there's cliffs along those edges. Steep drop. If I really, really wanted to get into the detail, I might zoom in really close and sharpen that up again when you're, when you have it softer, it's going to, it's going to feel as though it's sloping. It's not a sharp line. If you did want it to be really sharp, get in there, use a sharper brush. I'm using an airbrush for a lot of this, but if you really want it to be sharp, like real cliff, get in there with a straight edge. To find those edges way more than what I'm doing here. When we get into the mountain. I'm going to add some mountain areas. These are more rolling hills, highlands, lowlands. When you get into the sharper areas where they're mountainous, then yeah, you're going to see I'm going to really bring up the sharp edges because that's what mountains tend to be. Play with. The levels, the opacity levels to get the sense of depth that you want. You might not want it to be as intense. You might just want to play with the percentages just a little bit. And we'll end off here for now and we'll just start preparing our layers for the next phase. 6. Rough Terrain: All right, We're going to continue on with this tutorial by moving into some rock textures and we're not talking about mountain. I think. I think it's kinda cool to add. No, I don't know what you'd call it. Bad land type environments, areas where there might be some more rugged terrain, not Mountain, but almost like mountain. It just doesn't have the elevated height. And what it does is it adds a lot of texture that can be really attractive. To go about this. We're gonna do something a little bit different. I'm going to create a new layer. I'm going to call this rocky. And I'm going to add a few items here. So we're going to create just a few objects that are going to act as a stamp area. So all I'm doing is using my rectangular tool, creating an object, which let's see here. Sure that it's then, oh, I have it under the mass and I'm going to move it up. I have to move this above. Up here. We've got one object. We have two objects. I'm going to create another one. And these are rock textures that I've imported in the same way. And just to remind you how to go about this, you would open in a separate window. You would go to a rock texture that you've downloaded. Here I'll open some textures. So here it is in Photoshop. This is a file that's on my computer. You can see it. You know, it's just a nice deserty looking area. So when I say rock textures that I'm going to add to the map, they could be like this, that could be just desert areas with dry land, barren land, dry inland Rocky land, any kind of terrain like that, which adds ruggedness, is appealing in my mind to it adventure story and there might be an area that you'd want like this. So what I tend to do is I re-size it just a little bit so that it's not a massive file. You could probably leave it the same size, but I tend to, because the map isn't full scale, full resolution. This degree, you want the detail to be reduced a little bit. So I reduce this. And then if I want it to be a map or sorry, a pattern which I can add to my panel. Just as a reminder, I'm gonna go here under Edit. I'm going to go Define Pattern. We'll define it, we'll call it a desert one. Now you notice it got added to the side panel and that's now a pattern that I can apply when I come back here. So currently we have these two rock patterns. We're going to add a third one. We'll put it here. And this one we're going to colorize with that new pattern I just imported. So there we have three different kinds of textures that I think might look good in my design. What we wanna do is we want to combine these onto the same layer. So currently they're on three different layers. I'm going to combine it onto one because what I want to use is the stamp tool. And when they're on separate layers, It's not easy to access these stamping. And I'll show you what I mean when I use it if you're not familiar with the stamp tool. So here we're going to reduce this now, merge it. Merge Shapes. I see that's interesting. I'm going to have to make these image, I'm going to have to rasterize these. Rasterizing them makes them kinda flattened versions or merge them. Now these exist on one layer. And what I wanna do is I want to keep them off to the side a little bit. And if you've never used the stamp tool, the hotkeys S, I'm going to zoom in a little bit. I'm going to start on this side of the map. Now. I'm going to keep it above this layer here, which has the mask, because if I move it under the mask, it disappears. It's still there. It's just been masked out and it's over there. I want to keep it above for now so that I can draw. Over top of these sections here, I'm going to use S as my stamp tool. If you hold them. And I don't know what it is on a Mac, but if you hold down the Alt key, notice that my cursor changes to this and that's a target. What that does is it says I want to select this area wherever I press. So I want to use this stamp area first, this texture. Select that. Now you notice my cursor here has changed to that texture. So that when I start painting over here, actually going to take that step and know what you didn't notice. Over here. You can see there's a cursor paralleling what I'm doing here. And that's how it works. It's basically stamping, copying that texture. So if you notice, it's falling, if I went down here and try to paint down here, it's off. It's off that texture. That little crosses now there's nothing to stamp, so it doesn't copy it. But if I move up, you notice it catches that edge. It's kinda cool how that works. I don't want that obviously, so I'm going to undo that. If I want to change the location of the stamp, I would just hold the Alt key again. And I can stamp in that area. I can also switch then to this area up here and begin to stamp from there. It just takes a little practice to play with it to be familiar. But here I'm creating a desert area along here by using that stamp tool. And currently it's going into the water, but that's okay because once I move it under the mask, as you will see here, It's now masked where the river is supposed to run. If we look at that bigger, you can see now that my my map now has this cool textured area. If I drop it underneath the coloration, well, it'll start taking on the colorations that I've drawn in this area. If I want to add more color, paint on my color layer, Let's do that just for fun. Let's say I want this to be red, a red rock. Now I can start choosing tones that are kind of like that. Doesn't look great. I was just doing that for example, but yeah, it's, it's a very cool way to begin adding textures. I'm going to bring this back out, and I'm just going to work on continuing to build that up. Let's switch my stamp so I hit S, it Alt. We're now going to incorporate this kind of texture up here. The different kind of desert has a more of a red rock. I might use an airbrush as my brush so that it's, it's kinda has a soft blend. It might blend a lot nicer to do it that way. Let's go back here and bring that right to the coast. So I guess I'm designating this as my rustic desert. And they noticed that crossed into this area here. And you notice my cursor on the right. It's it's at that intersection. So I'm not catching that lower part. So that's where I would have to reset my stamp to make sure I'm not catching that. If I don't want that in my painting and I don't want it there. Let's change that. Let's correct that. Let's paint over with this. I'm not loving loving it. I just want to mix up these texture is a little bit. I'm catching that. Rock again. We'll drop this down here. And the fade, fade down here isn't very smooth. Smooth that out, just a pinch. Maybe it goes across the river bank just a little bit. Let's drop it down here just a little bit. There we go. We'll call this R. Let's catch this down here. Right? So that's kind of our designated desert area. Maybe I can do another section down here. The dry salt of the map. Alright, so again, if I move this underneath the mask, you'll see it crops everything nicely. There, you know, and I might, I might move that desert texture elsewhere on my map. You don't. Maybe I want it to also. Maybe I want it to also be somewhere over here in this southern area. Little spots. You can just again, you could just touch it in different areas just to change up your dynamic, the textures of the ground across your map. You get to it. It just kinda begins to add degrees of interest in the terrain. Maybe this this island, I didn't even do anything with this island over here so far. Now you can do that. Stamping the anywhere like I can begin to stamp this because this is on the same layer as these three. So I can stamp from somewhere over there if I want and bring it onto somewhere else, like over here. I can stamp this right here. So we're just kinda catching the stamps on different areas of the map now. Dry island. Looks alright. Let's try this rocky area. Now. You haven't used this. Let's, let's make this area along here like it is. The ridge, maybe the edge of a mountain range. A little bit of a canyon thing happening here. Now I am painting over top of some of my contour. Depth painting where I added shadow and light. So now maybe I would want to drop this underneath the shadow and light just to see if it looks okay. Maybe I like that, maybe I don't want it to avoid those. You just kinda have to play around where you want the placement. And let's just do that. One more area of my-map. Add that rocky texture. Let's do it somewhere over here. In my world, maybe this is like a canyon of some kind. Kinda has a canyon look. I'm going to use my eraser tool. So you can you can really play with how it actually integrates with my eraser tool. I can, maybe I want that hard line to be there on the edge. Same here. Maybe I want it to harden a little bit right there, rather than it blending too much. Do whatever you want. That stamp tool is effective. So if I zoom in a little bit more, take a look at the detail that we're capturing here. It ends up having just a real nice looking texture, very realistic, very interesting to look at. And this is a style of map you might not like this dull. There's a lot of other types of maps that look more ink. This is definitely, this is more of a realism, texture, different style. And that's, that's a choice you'll have to make when you're developing your own map. Okay, let's, let's, let's play a little bit more. I might end up coming back and adding some more of those textures that just really, it really is up to you. We never did really add anything up here. Let's add a little bit. So I'm going to borrow from these textures that I laid down here. We'll just add just a pinch. Now let's take a stamp from this area here. We'll add it. There, kinda fits good there for a little bit of this here, and we'll combine it with that rock. There. It looks okay to me. Things might be spread out a little bit, but now we're still going to add trees and we are going to add a little bit of mountain, and this kinda has a mountain look. You could even borrow that texture to develop your mountains. It's, it depends on how you want to construct that. Let's add trees, or let's, let's get into the mountains next, and that'll be the next video. 7. Mountains: So now we're going to be going into mountain ranges. And mountains are a little bit trickier than all the other things that we're going to add to the map. And the reason is our map is an aerial view. And we're looking down at contours and textures from an aerial position. Because we're using textures and for photography and using that stamp tool as our way of transferring textures across our map. We would want to try to get an aerial view of a mountain range so that it matches the perspective that we're developing here. But as you can imagine, it's not very easy to find photos from that Ariel position. So to use this same technique of stamping, yeah, it's, It's a bit more challenging. Let's put it that way. So I go to websites like unsplash.com. There's a variety of stock photography websites that you can go to try to find some good aerial photos. You just kinda have to be resourceful. Go looking around and try to find something that seems to match the color that the tone, all of those types of things and see what you can do with that. So what I'm gonna do is I did find a photo. It's not perfect, but I'm going to show you how you try to manipulate it to make it fit. So I'm going to paste it into a new layer. You can see the color isn't quite right. I'm going to move it above my mask layer and we're going to change this. So it's called Mountain. My typing. The color doesn't feel quite right. I do want it to have a little bit more of a gray. I also need it to have a little bit more contrast to bring up the shadows just a little bit more. So we're going to just, I'm just using my brightness contrast tool. Let's see here. I'm just adjusting the slider is just the train. Try to get it to be a little bit more. Get a little bit more pop in some of the color tone. And it's not gonna be perfect. I don't think this is a perfect photo, but let's stop there and we'll just see what we can do with it. I'm also going to change under image adjust, I'm going to change the hue and saturation. And the goal for this is to make it a little bit more gray scale. So it has that stone kind of look. Not too much. There's a bit of a brown tone, green tone, very earthy color scheme going on right now. Just a bit. Let's, let's leave it there. And I'm going to slide it over here. Now I might play with the scale a little bit. I might, I might condense this a bit. The pinch. So I'm going to position it over here and now we're going to use the stamp tool. So again, hot key. Hold down your Alt key. On a Windows machine, not sure of what a Mac select an area where you're going to begin to use as a stamp. So let's select right here. And I'm going to use this area here to become a mountain range. Play a little bit in here. I'm not going to add too much mountain. I don't want to spend too much time on this. But for example, let's begin painting here. I'm going to switch my brush to something a little bit harder edge. Again, when you get close to the edge, you might want it to be a little bit harder because these are rocks. And even though it's blending into grass, you do kinda wanna have that hard edge to capture the essence of rock rather than it just blending. It can blend a bit. It's always better to soften when you get right to the edge. There might be a little bit of blending that goes on. I'm just going to make it kind of trickle out into a bit of a transition. Let's look. It kind of goes into a rocky land. You go. So I mean, if I pull back a little bit, you're going to see it doesn't look bad. As far as implying that this is a mountain range. You may end up having to hunt a little bit for photos that better represent what you're looking for. I'm gonna do a little bit more here, just just touches. You also need to be mindful of the lighting or the light source that you've kinda settled on. And we did have the light coming from the right to match the color of the map, the lighting of the map. When you're looking for source photos, you do have to be mindful of that as well. Alright. I'm quite like this shape here, this color here. So I'm going to see me erasing this mountain area here jutting out. I might like the texture a little bit different somewhere else in the map. So let's pull something from this side, just a little bit blended in the pinch. A little bit harsh there. Alright. And I'm going to slide over here. And also I'm going to borrow now from this area here as a stamp. And we'll kinda blended into this dry land texture that we used earlier. If you really, really want to get into like blending your maps and the textures that you are selecting. You definitely can go to other textures from other areas like up here. If you wanted to stamp something from a different texture, a different type of rock, definitely you can do that. So there we have our mountain range. Now we want to get this mountain photo out of the picture. I'm just going to push it over a little bit so it's not overlapping anything and we have it above our mask. But I'm going to pull it below the mask again. And it's going to be covered now by the mask and disappear. Now remember if you need to colorize anything in this to make it better, blend in. We definitely can also playing with this area here because it looked a little funny to me. Stamping with that. Okay. So if you think that the color doesn't look quite right, go to your color layer, which we did in a couple of lessons ago. When the first ones, I'm on the color layer, I could select a color somewhere in here if I want it to overlay a bit. You can colorize some of these areas here a little more strongly. To try and get the coloration a little bit better. I'm just overlaying just a little bit of brown. Very subtle. Not much. Maybe even in the grass here just because it's you. Maybe I even want to go into the gray a little bit to imply this is like not lush, It's more rocky. And if you did want to get some snow cap going on some of these mountains, because these aren't really snow-capped mountains. You could manually paint a little bit of that on. So i'll, I'll do an example here. Know if it will require a little bit of, I don't know how much of an artists or how artistic you are. But absolutely you can. 8. Trees: So here we are where we are moving on to adding trees to this map. Trees are without question and easier find when you're looking for aerial photography to use as stamping tool. There's a few places in here when we get up here that there's not a lot done on this island. On this northern area, this island here is also pretty plain. The trees are a great filler. There's some really great textures. You can find different types of trees. Of course. What I found was this, and I'm going to pull this over top. So you can see now very dark. I don't like the darkness of this. So this is one of those things where you play around with color. Once again, I'm gonna go into the brightness contrast settings and I'm going to bump up the brightness. I want this to be a lot brighter. And we'll also play with the contrast, bring that up significantly as well. Here we have a good snapshot. We need to bring this size down significantly. Better scale too, match our map. And maybe something like that is good. Let's, let's drop in and take a look. Probably something like that. I'm going to name this layer trees. And we are above the mask line. So let's use our stamp tool and let's begin to transfer some trees over. So let's just start along this area here and you'll begin to see it. Come to life. Brush tool again, it's up to you. I tried to use an airbrush a lot, but when you're doing things that maybe have a bit of an edge, when you get to the edge of the tree line, maybe it needs to be a lot harder, so I'll just continue using this kind of square brush. You might need to keep readjusting the placement of your stamp because there's, there's areas of trees where they're a little bit more dead. The angle of the tree might change based on the stamp location. I don't like the darker trees nearly as much as the brighter tree, so I'm going to keep dropping back into the brighter areas here. Once you're stamping or you begins to grow, where you're painting, you can begin borrowing. Now the stamp, you notice my little cross is right there where my stamp references. It saves you from going back way over there. Now, this is only one step. You might want pine trees, you a different kind of tree. And you definitely have the option to go into reference. Find a different kind of tree so that there's variety throughout your map. For me, I don't really want to spend the time getting too worried about that. I like the style that I have here. I'm going to switch my brush to it. I'm going to airbrushing, just want to see what it looks like. The softer edges. Blend a little bit nicer. Alright? Alright. Let's zoom out and just take a look at how that's influencing the map. So it's definitely changing the quality of the map a fair bit. Let's go down here, start introducing some trees. The mountain areas pretty dry down there. So maybe there's not a lot of them along here. We'll get some treeline. Get some on this island which is. It's completely barren on here. Why don't we try and change things up a bit. I'm actually going to re-paste this. And I'm not going to shrink it as small. I'm going to leave it a little bit bigger. I just want to see the effect of changing the scale of the trees. Play with some brightness contrast. There's ways of creating different textures and different size of trees might have a nice effect on the feeling that we have. So even though they're the same trees, it's giving it a little bit of a different feeling. Looking for ways of creating variety. Nice little lush area here along the. You may also be trying to think about where cities might go in your map. So that might influence location of treelines. You might even want to add your city locations first because there might be roads that you also want to consider. And maybe roads is what I'll add next. Let's try a different tree altogether. All go back to my reference. I could find a different quality of tree. These trees feel very different. I'll bring it in right now. They're just puffier, fluffier trees, more lush. The color contrast. Now let's size a little bit. Maybe they won't look enormously different. I'm not sure. So currently I have three different tree layers now because I've brought in, I'm going to actually combine these layers so I'm not confusing myself. In our last tree layer, they're going to combine these three layers. Alright, so let's borrow from this tree area and it'll have a little bit of a different feeling. Just slightly different. They look much more lush. I kinda like that. Let's put some more trees up here. We have nothing up here. So on this island up here, get some trees going. 9. Cities, Roads and Labels: On a map like this, Bob, cities can be represented in a lot of ways. You could use iconography. You can just use kind of like on a standard map. You would normally see a dot. So I'm going to keep it pretty simple. For maybe small cities, I'm going to use a circle. And I'm going to fill this with what can I, maybe I'll just stick with white. We'll just keep it really simple. Maybe the white can have an outline that is orange. Make that a few pixels thick, so you see it a little bit. And we'll add a drop shadow. Okay, So we have one city there, Let's say we have another city over here on this side. We'll do the same thing where, you know, bigger, bigger the bigger the city. Maybe squares are castles. The style of the city. Totally up to you on how you want to execute that. I mean, I'm not gonna get too carried away. This is just making this up as I go. So maybe this is a little little one. Then we have right here on the edge of the mountains. One little part right there. All of these are kinda randomly being positioned around my map layer. So I'm going to condense these. All these cities. Typing is horrible today. Cities start another one. We'll call this castles. Castles. We are going to make square. And we'll make them outlined with green filled with white. We're going to have a big castle there. Will apply a drop shadow. You definitely can get way more creative with your, you know, iconography is great. You can, you can go and hunt for nice little castle graphic, whatever, however you wanna do that. City names, of course, you can get into, you know, I'm gonna make up a town like this is Springfield. Well, we'll call this, make this 26 pixels too big. Drop shadow to that. New field. Carbs healed. However you wish. Whatever feels good in terms of naming, positioning of labels. These might be too big for you and you might prefer, know, for a smaller one to be 14. Might prefer it to be positioned underneath. The rules are yours to make. I'm just going to move a bunch of these around. Don't mind the repetition. This one, we'll give it a 20, we'll call it his castle. This one will be Queens castle. You can name forests. You can do as much as you want. Let's get some roads in here. So the reason I put the cities in first is because I might want to connect city to city and have something that makes a lot of sense. So we're going to make this, I'm going to make my roads. Let's make them orange so they stand out in contrast. Let's now I'm going to use, you could freehand paint these. You can also use the Freeform Pen tool that will allow you to draw like that. We gotta get rid of the fill, turn off the fill. Let's crank up the stroke width so it will make this ten, so it stands out a little bit. And because it's a stroke, a free form stroke, you can adjust the placement of the points if you, if something doesn't make sense, like for instance, I'm looking at how this kind of intersects the river, doesn't make sense the way it's positioned. So if you make a mistake, you can easily correct it like this. We'll make this layer in a group. And that says roads. Maybe I want to drop it underneath the cities so that it goes underneath. If there's if it's actually touching the city, we'll kinda pass underneath the city. You can apply color effects. So if I want it to not like to almost blend in and have a little bit of texture. You can do things like, you know, on. We'll make this a dodge, a linear dodge or a color dodge will drop the opacity just a little bit. So there's a little bit transparent. You can see. So let's do another one. Following that same style. Freeform Pen Tool. Go up around right there to cause ill. And it's gonna share the same color values because I have the settings the same. We're gonna go across the bridge. Now. I said bridge in my mind was thinking, well, we could actually create a bridge here. And that would look kind of cool here to this one. Let's make this path now kind of fork to this one. See how that's working. Let's add another one here. This one is gonna go down tonicity. Let's cut across up here. Cross the castle. And then we're going to have it branch off here. And we're gonna go to the city. So there we have now a network of roads and paths that go between. Maybe we want to add another one down here. And we're going to connect this guy. Bring it up. Round. Join that path there. Not looking too bad. You can name for us, of course, there's labels that you can put on anything. Town up here. There's nothing on these islands here. I'm going to add just a couple more texture things. While i'm, I'm gonna do that in the next video. So we'll end off here. I might fill in some holes where there's missing town names here. It's kinda sad that they're all named cubs field, and I'll add one more here. Let's call this new Caps Lock, new URL. For that matter. Before I move on to another video, let's, let's create a bigger type set for the name of the island. So this might be obviously I've, we'll call this, um, king's land. Now this is gonna be our primary title. So obviously a little bit bigger. Add some shadow to that. This island here has no cities or towns at the moment. So we'll make this a little less significant. We'll call this queensland. This one up here. We'll call it new island, very creative and RTI. Labeling sometimes is the coolest part of maps because you can, you know, when we think of JRR Tolkien and you know, all the, the little places, the little mountains, the, the forests, they all had unique names and that's where it can be a lot of fun. This is fingering forest. I might change the font to something a little bit different for the effect of a different type of labels. So these would perhaps be it a different font, maybe even a different color. Maybe we, maybe we make all the forests into kind of a yellow. It follows a different scheme in mind. Actually don't like that font for this map. I'm going to change it. I don't know what to make it offhand. Maybe we do do something scripty. Don't like that either. But I'll just leave it for now. You can see how you can get right into the detail of everything and creek, everything that is necessary for say, a game or a story that you're in the process of creating. Let's end off this video. With that. 10. Extra Details: So this last video we did labeling and now we're going to move into just, I'm just going to add a little bit more texture, a little bit more. A little bit more of that can fill in some of the, you can go as far as you want with texture. You can also just not go overkill. But there's, I just wanted to show a couple more things for sake of just showing how full and I just want to show a little bit more so you can see how full and diverse some of the areas of your map could get. You know, there's areas that are very open, that could be farmland. You can add snow. You can do a lot of things like that. I'm going to open up another photo that I found and it kinda had a farmland field. So I'm thinking the Shire a kind of a different kind of landscape farmed land, some kinda little community. It has a nice feeling and I just thought it would look really cool to add this as a floor effect. So I'm going to pull this outside of the mask area and reduce it down. I'm just going to add this to a few places for effect. And then there's one other thing that I thought looked really cool that I'd like to bring in. And I'm going to open it up in a different layer or in a different document. This you see how there's like the shelves. I thought that looked really cool and kinda looks like Some more rugged along the coastline near the Scottish Highlands or something like that. Not quite an even more exotic than that. It might look really cool in context of our map. So I'm going to pull this over also into our map. Reduce this down. So these are two little detail areas. And I'm going to add and we'll throw it in somewhere along the coast. So, alright, so we're gonna start with this farmland area and we're just going to select part of the map here. And I'm gonna do nothing other than just to add another day, another layer of texture that I think, you know, it'll just again adds to the story of the map. You can even see a little town if you wanted to say little building there. I mean, you may want that there, you may not want that there. But it definitely adds a little bit of character and story to that. Might be too bright. So maybe we adjust the how it blends in. These Layer. Layer Styles can really come in handy if you're not used to using them, playing around with them, the color effects, it can look really cool. So maybe that's even all I am going to do is just maybe I'll do it one little area over here as well. So we'll just pull in a little bit, just a little bit of texture. Nothing more than that. Just a touch. Let's do another one over here. Just a touch. It looks like little pieces of farmland. Touch. As to the story of your map. Farmland around the castle. Small little touches like that make a big difference. We'll pull this underneath our masking layer so we get rid of that. Let's go back to the, yeah, see, that's a little bright. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go back to that pin layer because I thought that layer effect worked for this. Just subtle. Let's go now to that other layer where we have this and let's add that to this island here for one. We're going to add a little bit of this. So this exotic island has a little bit more. I'm interests behind it. Again, we're using sharp edges, so I tend to stay away from the airbrush because the sharp edges might look better when they're crisp. All of this is going to, I'm disappear. You see I painted over the edges that will all even out when I get to the point of moving it underneath the mask. And we're going to do that also here. Just subtle. It's like it's like this area here is a bit of a rugged section on the coast. I'm going to drop this now underneath mask. This doesn't look good here. It looks a little messy. Now that I see a mask off. And we'll play with the layer effect a little bit so it blends maybe a bit better. Yeah, there you go. You can continue adding details, stone textures, different farmlands. You go as far as you want. The goal is to make it arrive at a place where it's telling the story that you want to tell and lays out the landscape the way that you want to have it laid out all up to you. And I think that's the cool part about using of the source photos as textures because you can find the texture that works for you in the environment. You can build the world in the way that you want if you need it to have a lot of water texture, for example, you can really get into the water textures. You can. I'm gonna do that right away. We're gonna get into the water and next, we'll leave it off here, just some final details that we just did to fill up the map a little bit more. And let's move on now to the final touches of of the water. 11. Color Options & Water Details: So here we are at the end of the tutorial, and I'm just going to present a few little optional things that you can do to try to maybe give a little bit more oomph to your map creation. And that is some coloration variations, some highlighting things that I'd like to do, make things pop a little bit more. And it depends on maybe the style of the map that you want. Maybe you want it to look a little bit older, a little bit more of a rustic feel. There's a few little details that we can play with that might make it more appealing to you for your purposes. One thing that I do is I will make a duplicate of the original map outline. So at the beginning we created the first base outline of all the islands and the primary land base. And what I do is I create an outline and a glow. I'll show you what it looks like. So I'm just going to turn on I made this previously. You can change the color of it however you want. It can be very intense or very light. It might not show up a lot right now. But what I'm going to also do is I'm going to show you what it would look like if we change the background color just a little bit. And maybe you want it to have a little bit more richness. Right now it's kind of a sky blue. And you might prefer to have something like, I don't know what you would call this. It's muted though it's not quite as vibrant. It kinda makes it look a little bit older too, because it takes the color down to a washed out, look less vibrant, less bright. And then also makes the green a little bit less vibrant as well. It has that effect. So this is before, this is after for that matter though. And I'll show you, you could you could drastically change the color to something totally different. There's no reason that you have to even stay in the same family. Maybe you want it to have a paper. Look. And I'm not saying that this is the color that you would pick, but you could really go in a different direction. But you can also now see that outline that I did. So I'm going to play with that just a pinch. What I did was I added a stroke and an outer glow. If I change the opacity of this layer itself, you'll notice that the glow gets a lot dimmer. The outline gets a lot dimmer. I'm going to turn off that brown because I don't think that's working for me. But now that the blue is a little bit more muted and darker, it stands out a little bit more. When I do increase the intensity of that outline, that glow, it might add too much detail to do that. And even overall, you might be looking at the map and thinking there's maybe a little bit too much detail. It might feel a little busy at this point. Quick ways to change the, the feeling of detail to mute and bring it back down. A little bit more simple look. I would go down to the shadow and highlight layers that we created to create the rolling hills. That the rolling hills definitely add a lot of dynamic to the map. So quickly you could do is to drop the shadow. That's going to flatten everything a fair bit. Same with the highlight. And just by flattening the map, it makes it look a fair bit less busy here. If we go back to what it was, we were looking at something like that. Does something like that. It just reduces detail. Might feel a little bit more comfortable like this for you. So I'm going to leave it somewhere a little more muted than the original. Let's call it right here. You can also change the opacity of the roads. If they're feeling a little bright. You can have it full intensity, but again, to mute it a little bit, you could bring it down. You can also change the color of the roads. There's a lot of little subtle things you can do. You can make the roads thinner. If you wanted, even to show the predominance of one road versus another, you can begin to massage the feeling of everything just a little bit. Um, things that you could also do. You can create a little bit of a glow. This is something I enjoy doing. Also, just to create a little dynamic. You can create a glow behind the island as though the water is glowing a little bit. And it makes the island pop a bit as well. So if I zoom out a little bit more, just a subtle little thing. Again, this is a more simple, this adds a little bit more visual. But it might not be desired because the muted, flatter look would be this. And it's up to you. Another thing you can do is add water texture. So I brought in. A water layer. I pasted it in. It's already in the background. You can see it appeared on the left here. And you might not want it that intense, but I'm going to make it full intense. And I'm going to, I'm gonna do some, Oops, sorry for the sound. I'm going to begin to stamp it and spread it out a little bit so so we can make it kind of encompass the area of the island. I'm just a little nooks and stuff and I wouldn't do it everywhere. But you can just kinda fill in little spots around the islands. Filling in a little bit. Subtle details around add some water dynamic beyond just being flat. I'm going to erase some of this here because it fuels obviously a little bit much in sections here. I'm actually just going to add a layer mask rather than deleting it. Unmask a lot of this out softly. And I'll bring back that. Knock it back a little bit so the intensity is reduced, just a pinch. Just subtle stuff you may or may not like that, but that allows you to add a little bit of dynamic around the edges. When you zoom in. There's a lot of detail to look at. And depending on why you're using this or what you're using it for, being able to zoom in. By the way, I made this at a very high resolution, very high resolution. I think I'm at 88 thousand pixels by 6 thousand or something like that. Reason I made it really big. So that I preserve detail when I'm creating it and then I can reduce it. I always like creating things overly vague depending on what purpose, because maybe I want to use this on a poster. Maybe I want to use this some kind of print element. And the size might be important for me down the road. You can always create a big and reduce it. You can't do the opposite. If you make it too small, then you want to stretch it, it doesn't work. This allows you a little bit of flexibility, but this is the final product I'm at right now. You can do things like adding a paper texture over top. If you wanted to create some color dynamic. I'm going to drop that color pop behind it. We got that. I'm going to add something else just to show you. So if we did want to colorize, say the map a little bit, I'm going to add a color or hue layer over top. You can completely change the color of your map by just adding a layer over top of everything, making, maybe making the color the layer style into hue or you could change it to color as well in color would do that. Allows the air to be a little bit more dynamic and the color, but we can reduce the opacity of that layer and look at it. Again, it changes the field, it feels a little bit more old. The style changes rather significantly when you begin playing with colors like that. Another layer that I had previously created and played with. It's a different feeling. Now, if you change the color, this might be preferable. You can always adjust things, tweak things. That's the beauty of working in digital for a maps and that sort of thing. Yeah, so I'm going to end it off here and I'll go into a little bit of a conclusion. 12. Conclusion: I just wanted to thank you for taking all of these lessons with me if you've made it all the way to the end. Congratulations. I hope this is helpful for whatever you might be creating. If you're a storyteller like me, maybe it will be useful. Maybe you're using this for a game that you're creating, whatever your purpose. Thank you for giving your time and I hope to see you in another tutorial. Thank you. Bye.