Creating Watercolor Maps in QGIS

1. Course Intro: Hello, welcome to my Skillshare course. My name is Scott Lucy or I'm your instructor. I put this course together all about creating watercolor maps in QGIS. I am a fundamental studies instructor at Suffolk University in Boston and making GIS maps for about 30 years now, hard to believe. I'm going to teach you how to make a cool maps like, like this one of St. John, right? That's the goal here. How are we going to do this? Well, using QGIS and all the tips and tricks I've learned over the years. We're gonna, we're gonna get you to that point. So talk a little bit about the logistics of the course. The files are included if you want them. You can start this from scratch. Just a new document right out of QGIS, or I'm gonna show you how to do all that. But you can also just in the resources section, all the files that I'm using I put in there so you can take those files and create them and are just create them, you're on your own or use the ones I have and just work off of those if you want to do that just to get started really quickly. In a second, we'll look at some example maps that we're going to do. But on to the class itself. You know, some QGIS experience is required, but it is helpful, right? So GIS software can be a little tricky to learn. So if you have some experience, I don t think there's nothing in here that's really all that complicated, no coding or anything. But if you're new to GIS, I think this might be a lot. I do have a introduction to QGIS course in Skillshare. If you want to check that out and do that first, kinda learn the basics. And I think if you get through that course, you could, you could certainly get to figure this out. Two great, great piece of software, a great technology, useful and very whole bunch of applications, not just the artistic ones that we're doing now. And then I think that's about it. We'll get going soon. Of course reviews are appreciated. So if you liked the course, give me a Skillshare tends to devalue those and I value those and it gets more people to see this stuff and I would appreciate it. All right, So let's go let's do this. Let's go take a look at some of the maps I've made and some of the maps that you will make Soon. Alright, cool. 2. Example QGIS Watercolor Maps: Let's look at some examples of some of the watercolor maps that you'll be able to do once you're finished this tutorial. So starting here with a pretty simple one, this is Nantucket. Really just a couple of different watercolor files layered on. We have a few few features here. We've got the fade around the water will show how to do that with a shapers fill. We've got inland water, no roads or anything. We could easily add those, but some fonts, different colored fonts. But pretty straightforward. Just as the raster fill, you may be familiar with this. Moving on, we could, we've got the south west coast of Ireland here, you know, pretty complicated coastline. We've got sort of a jagged pen looking edge around it. The fade, we've got a nice watercolor edge here. Some county lines kinda dividing things up a little bit so, you know, a little bit more complicated. I guess. Moving on, we've got the island of Jamestown here and narrower again, it's a bay in Rhode Island. So, you know, sort of a splotchy purple. So again, just a raster kind of filled in there. Um, you know, as long as was large enough, it'll, it'll slide right in there. We've got a lot of other data in here, right? So we've got some wetlands, we've got houses, roads and some more labels. So getting a little more complicated and you know, buoys, sort of a more detailed watercolor splash. They're selling of a simple, simple texts, features and sort of, uh, you know, older parchment background for the paper. Right? So moving on, same map with just the, um, you know, the the roads and the wetlands and the houses and everything just has a sort of a rainbow, a rainbow watercolor image behind it. So you can start to get a little more fancy. You could use any watercolor image of an appropriate size. You can layer in there with the raster image, fill in and get there right. So that's that. This is the one I think looks much better than the yellow gives it a contrast. You can kinda see the details a little bit. This one, this one is pretty popular. So again, with the parchment background. Moving on, we've got, sort of getting a little more complicated now we've got a fishers island off of Connecticut in Long Island Sound. Actually part of New York. But we've got the same, you know, kind of watercolor line work. When you zoom back enough, we've got some fading around the texts. A nice watercolor paper background is nice. So all filled in so that, you know, starting to look a little bit more complicated here is zooming into and St. John, coral harbor. And you can see that paper better here in the feed, how that all works and still got the crisp line work, but sort of that watercolor feed book here is that St. John map framed up. Kind of catches your eye. Think I've added a lot more information, inset map. And you can get as complicated as you want, the grid coordinate systems around the edge. You know, getting a little more sort of a blend between a crisp data focused map and the watercolors. So kind of a mix here, that's where I've gotten to and even some of the lines where the national park lines and things are. And then here's one of St. Croix where I have layered in. You can see the blue. I did that in Procreate with my iPad. And we'll show you how to do that. So you can kinda just get the balloon where you want. Some of the other ones that we saw just had the whole, entire square filled. This gives it a little more water, more customization to it, these little details that really matter. And then say map, I've St. Croix. Well, I'm sorry. This one. This map of St. Croix. So it's got the full blue background. This is set to 1920 by 1080, so enough to fill a screen. So I use this as my screensaver. You could build screensavers with these and just export them in. Import them in as your screensaver, which I think is cool. Then my latest one, Bermuda, I started to play around with the colors that the tans and the pink coral. Bermuda ish look right with the watercolor backgrounds. So, you know, the font is sort of a handwritten font. You can play around with that a little bit. You can change the size of those. And we'll get into this point, right? So it's, it's a lot of fun. So let's do this. 3. Setup: Okay, we're almost ready to go. Let's get set up in the class and the class page. You are going to see down here in the projects and resources section, you're going to see a resources zip file here. Alright, so you're gonna click that. It's going to download that into your downloads area. And you need to just do a little bit of work there to unpack that. So we're gonna go, I usually hit this button and hit show in folder, and it is downloaded into my Downloads Area. What I'm gonna do is click on and hit extract all or maybe I'll right-click on it either way and hit Extract all and navigate to a place where you want to save this, I suggest making a folder just for this course which keeps all of your resource data, all the things you create, just keep everything in one spot. I'm going to just put this into my Downloads folder. Keep it here. I don't really need it. So in any event, it unpacks that and you get your resources. Here. In there. I've got a bunch of files, right? So some raster fills some QGIS files that we're going to need. We also have two other zip files and now we're going to unzip those as well. So I'm just, I'm going to right-click that, hit extract all. Put it in that folder. Extract. Okay, It's gonna give me all these shape files that I'm going to need. And then we'll do the deluxe label or we won't need this yet. But while we're here, let's just get this done. Strike that. Okay, it's going to put that there, right, so we've got another shape file in there and all the shape files we're going to need. So let's get QGIS going. We've got a blank instance here. I'm using 28.3, 0.28, 0.3. But we're just starting with a blank, perfectly blank document. Nothing's going on. We're in a WGS84 projection system. So basic latitude, longitude. But what we're gonna do is click the Open, the data source manager. Go to the vector section. Make sure this says vector, and then browse to wherever you saved that. And in my case it was the downloads folder, but this will be wherever you saved it. So I'm going to resources cross-shaped files, and I've got this down here set to Esri shapefiles, which makes things simpler. You can use all, but it's gonna give you a lot more stuff. So what I like to do is go to File Type as reshaped file, and that kind of simplifies it. So I can shift and click and put them all in. And then hit Add. Me give you a transformation. Dialogue at multiple screens here. Hold on. Right, you might get this just hit Okay. And then hit close. And there you go. So now we've got your, your land and your roads and your hydrology. These come up as random colors. So when you pulled yours up, they may be a different color. We're gonna we're gonna change those colors pretty soon. So don't worry about that if you really want to turn these blue, like the water blue or something, you know, could do that if you want. If that makes you feel better. But that's where we got. So now now we're ready to go. We're going to, we're going to throw in some quick raster polygons. Some quick raster, raster filled polygon. Philip fill the polygons with rasters. The quick and easy way, we'll start there. Alright. 4. Watercolor Polygon Fills: Let's add in the watercolor and the land. Start this. We'll do this the easy way. This is pretty straightforward or raster image failure probably you're familiar with GIS at all. You've probably done this, but let's, let's do this, right? So we're going to right-click on our land layer and open up properties. And we're gonna go with, we've got a single symbol here. It's just a simple orange fill. If we go down to the second level and click the symbol layer type and set this to raster image film. It's gonna give us this the ability to add in a raster and what it's going to, you've got to use this box here. It's not labeled. I think it's a little confusing, but that's where you gotta go. If you go into your resources section, wherever you downloaded your class out of the resources section of the class, we will find these resources here, right? So what we're going to use here is the green watercolor raster fill. So I just click on that. I hit open. And sometimes it takes a second, but there it goes and just hit Apply and Okay. And here we are. Now we have the green raster color fill. So that's, that's pretty straightforward. I might do the same thing with the hydrology. I might say, Okay, I'm going to, rather than use this blue, I'm going to go with the raster image fill, tell it where the picture lives, open, Apply. And Okay, so now I've got that nice blue watercolor image filling in my water so they don't have edges to them. And that's fine. We'll deal with that next. But that's, that's pretty much pretty much how easy it is to just use a raster image, fill, find the right file, and put it in there and you're a big step in the right direction. And move on to the lines next. 5. Watercolor Linework: Alright, let's add in, improve upon the line work, adding some watercolor. A look in lines here to this. This looks nice, but wouldn't really say it looks like a watercolor just yet. So let's, let's start with the land and then we'll go there and we will right-click, go to properties or double-click, and you get to this layer properties where we were before. Well, you can do here is kinda stack in the layers, right? And kind of make them all look like one. So you can kind of get real fancy with the layers. In this case, I'm going to hit the add symbol layer button. And the default is blue, which isn't really what we want. So I'm going to click on that and go down here to the fill color and click on the dropdown and make that a transparent fill. So that gives me this simple fill of a 0.26 mm and bump that up so you can see it and hit Apply and Okay, now you can see I've got got more of a, a line to it, right? So better, right? This is what watercolor artists would do. Kind of ink the line around it first. But it's awfully crisp. Still doesn't look quite right. So let's change that. So what I'm gonna do is go to Properties again and go to the simple fill that line I just put in and I'm gonna go load in the style that I provide for you. So you just gotta load style will get this database is Style Manager that on the screen. So you can see that. So you're gonna get, you're gonna get this and then hit the three buttons. And you'll get into the class resources folder again that you downloaded and watercolor polygon and hit, Okay. And then just slowed style. You don't need to mess with things and then you get this, this watercolor style. Now, we'll hit Okay, and you can see now it's a the stippled line that looks a lot more natural, so that's good. So, you know, before you, before you leave, you might want to save that. So hit, hit the save symbol over here and that will put it in your defaults. I have, I have some saved down here. In my, you know, whenever I open QGIS, it'll be there if it put it in the default folder. So be sure to save that. I mean, it's always available to you now, but, you know, that's, that's as easy as it gets. We can do the same with the major roads. I'm going to load, go back again. Load style. Tell it where it lives, the watercolor line. Okay, hit load style hit Okay. And now my roads also have that stippled line effect, a little bit thinner, which is kinda how I wanted it to kind of distinguish the two. So I might even do the same around the, the pons, right? So I'm gonna go like this. I'm going to add a layer, make it transparent. Click on it. And I'll just load it up again, just watercolor. I1. Want to call it polygon or polygons mode style. Okay, and I'm going to add in this ad in a raster image, fill that blue again. And that should be going to mix. I'm going to put this underneath, so I'm going to drop it down to the bottom and hit Okay, so now I've got that stippled line around the that the ink work, right. So that's that's the easy way. Use this. I'll, I'll give you some bonus. You know, how, how actually we set those up. So what we do is use a random generator. So in order to do that, we will use a marker line. So we'll, we'll set up a marker line. And in the market line, you go down to the third level. Why don't we start with a new one? Let's do it like this, right? So let's just go basic black and white, right? And okay, we're gonna, we're gonna make the marker line around the roads, right? So let's say, I want to add that in. I'm gonna go simple fill and sentiment. Instead of simple, I'm going to use a outline marker line and I get this red, red dots, right? Not really exactly what I'm looking for. Go down to the next slide. We're gonna go through this pretty quickly. This is more advanced stuff, but just so you know how it works. But the marker line, I'm going to turn that black. Then my integral is there. And the simple marker. Let me see here. For the size, I'm going to, I'm going to create, create an edit that, right, so I'll get the expression StringBuilder. And what we'll do is go, we're already set the size Rand can search for that Would that way. So you can see the rand function, right? And this tells you how to do it, right? So here's the syntax. Take, take care to look at this. The Ran, You just need Ran Min and max. You don't need that CD equals null. So let's say I'm gonna do ran one for one size dot and three. I'm just kinda guessing as to what they need. Here. What you do is check this preview to make sure if you get a real number there, you're on the right track. So hit Okay. And now we got, we have random numbers or random sizes along the line. So let's take a look and see what that looks like. So better. But it's still a bit of a mess right there too large. This can be a lot of trial and error, but once you find it the way you want it, you save it. So I'm going to drop the integral down to one another a little bit closer. I'm going to change the marker. It looks like I've got some sort of transparency and my marker. Let's see. Let's see. I just want a simple black dot with no stroke color on the edge. So I'm just going to set that to no pen so that makes it solid. And those are, that's the default. So let's just try that. So a little bit too thick. So again, trial and error. So the interval, Let's make, turn that back to three so we can kinda see it right there. Not really random nor are they. Let's see what's Look at that. The marker size. Let's go to my recent rand, one-three, makes them random. Okay? Push them together with the intervals. That, alright, Now we're getting, now we're getting somewhere. And if we look at, here's my opacity issue, crank that up to 100, okay, right, So now we're getting better. I think that's pretty good. I think I just need to move them a little bit closer and make an interval of one and you can see them out there screeching in. And if I back off of that, there's still too thick. Though. I like the spacing, so we'll go to the marker again, use the the data defined override expression. I'm going to edit that and set a 13. We're gonna go 0.5 and say too, that should make a smaller dots. So it's going to make a randomly set them between 0.5 and two. So we're getting closer. And I would play with that, maybe give it one more shot here. Point 2.5. Alright, and then if they make them smaller, I need to scooch them together a little bit more so that 0.5 and there we are. We're getting, we're getting better, right? So I might, I might scooch them together little bit more, make them a little bit smaller, and then add in the simple fill. I'm gonna make this the raster image fill of the blue water color raster fill in. So there, so there we go. So now you can see where I'm going with this. I'd probably spend another 3 min or 5 min, whatever playing around with it, getting those just right. And then when I'm done, I'd go to Properties and I would hit Save and save it down here in my, in my default. So that'd be able to do it again. So but I also gave you 12, so you are good to go. So that's it. So that's how you play with the line work to get that, that pen, that stippled stylus pen look whatever you wanna call it. But makes it look a little rougher, little more hand-drawn. And I think that's that's the look we're going for. So there you go. 6. Coastal Fade: Alright, continuing on, we're going to put a fade around our island here. All this is gonna be blue eventually, the ocean around this island. But I want to kind of a fatal look. The watercolor artists are, we kinda blend things together. It's going to look a lot more natural if we do this. We're gonna use a shapers fill. So I'm going to create a white shape burst fill all around all the land so that it's easier to see. If I go into Project Properties and I change the background color to some sort of a blue or something. That way, this is what it's gonna look like. We're going to do the blue a different way, but just so we can visually see what's going on. That's, that's why I said that. So what we're gonna do is build another land file. And we're going to, so we're going to right-click that hit Duplicate Layer. And I like to rename these things right away because I forget. So we're going to call this land. So right now it's exact copy, duplicate of what you're seeing. But let's change that. Alright, so I double-click it Gordon into symbology. And let's just make it something simple for now. And at the top level, we're going to go set a single symbol. We're going to use the inverted polygons. Alright, so that's, that's we want to feed on the, we want to do the symbology on the outside of the island, right? So that's so hit Inverted polygons. And then you hit simple fill. And we're going to use the shapers fill tool here. And I get this shapers fill it. So now what? This will make sense when you see it more than probably just yet. But what you do is you set the top one to the white and then the bottom one to transparent. So I'm going to Transparent button up top. And then I'm going to set my distance to set this to ten. I'm going to add some blur to it. Just trust me on this. It'll look great. And then hit Okay. And then you turn it on and that's what you get. Right? So that's the shape burst fill with a ten and some blur to it. As you roll in and out, it will change. But when you get it to the right scale, something like that on your paper, that's going to look great so that the watercolor artists wouldn't, would kinda, wouldn't go right up to the line because things will start to blur together. So it gives it a more of a natural look. So there you go. There's your line fades with shapers fill. 7. Simple Labels: Next we're going to make some simple labels, right? So we're gonna go to the here, here we go, the create new shape file button, new shape file layer. And we're going to call this, let's call it labels. And we're going to make sure we save it to a proper location. Um, you know, put them on my desktop for now. So typically what I, what I will do is just make it a point file for this. If you're gonna get into curved lines and curved labels, that gets a little more complicated. I don't typically do that, so I'm not going to go over that here. That's more advanced stuff, but really just kind of a basic label where I want it is most of the battle, right? Labels are very important. People don't really understand how labels, how much work goes into the labels. Just getting them just right. Showing, showing some labels, not showing some others. The size of them. Pinpoint placement of them really, really matters. And there's a lot of work that goes into it and a lot of care. It's one of these things. You kinda have to build them yourself to do this if you want them just in the right spot. That's just the reality of this. Anyways, we're gonna, we're gonna create a simple label file. And we'll add a new field called label, which is a text string of 80. That's fine. Click Add Field. Keep this at WGS84 is fine. If I, if I knew exactly where this was going to be. I may I may set it to mass islands in this case, but we'll leave it at WGS84. We're not doing any calculations off of it. So not really a big deal for the geometry type. Set that to zero point, and we are good to go. So now I have my label's file. I'm going to move it up, like it on the top there. And you know, I have an attribute table, it's empty. And this is where I'm going to store my labels. So what's, what's put us build the label. Let's hit the edit button. And let's say I'm going to create a at a point feature down here. Call this service-side beach. And there we go, a point shows up, well, that's great, but we can, we need to work with that. We're going to right-click that. Go to properties, go to the labels section over here at the top where it says No Labels. Click that down button and you'll get single labels. The value is labels, that's what we just created. You shouldn't have any, anything else at this point. And then for the texts, we can set our font. Let's go with some sort of handwritten thing. We'll go with a size 12, we have a black. And then, so that's great. So now we've got a label shows up to the upper right. What I like to do is set this to put the dot right underneath the center of it. So I'll go to placement in mode, go to offset from point in it. It's automatically set to the center point, so hit. Okay, and now you see that label is right on top of the points. So I can put the point right in the center are things and kinda know where I'm at. All right, going back there again, back into your properties. I want to get rid of that dot. So I'm gonna hit symbols. Click on the simple marker and just set that size to zero. I could set it to no pen either way. And there we go. So now it looks like a real label. If I want to do a carriage return, I'll go into labels and formatting. In, hit the rap on character, I use a pound sign. So if I add that pound sign in there and service-side beach doesn't do a carriage return. If I go into my attribute table and add a pound sign in the middle of that and watch what happens. So now, does a carriage return? So if I did too, it would make a space in-between them. You can't you can't have a pound sign for any other reason. But typically we don't. So that works well. So anyway, so that's where we're at. If I want to move it around a little bit, I'll use the We're text tool here. And I click See the center bullseye there. I can click there. And if I want to scoot around, that's fine. Let's, let's build another one. Just for fun. So click on the Add Point feature. This is okay, very good. So that's, that's labeling. Now, you know, I, I end my edit session. It's going to ask me to save it, right? So now I have an attribute table with my 22 labels in it, right, which is great. So I would go around, pinpoint these places and said that the size of it really matters. They're all going to be labeled the same way with this method. But it's a good basic way to put some labels on your, on your watercolor map. And you use the handwritten font. You can play around with that and or not, whatever you like, it's up to you as the artist. But that will, that'll set you up, right? So there you go. So there are your labels. 8. Label Fades: Let's take our labels to the next level and put a little 0 glow underneath those a little bit, kinda like our fade around the coast. Same idea with the with the labels. So I'm going to right-click on my labels, go to Properties. And we're going to do some sort of a buffer. Let's just do a buffer here. We've got 1 mm white buffer around it. That is okay, but that doesn't look very realistic. What I'm going to actually, I'm gonna make these, these a little bit larger just so we can see them. So here's, so here we go so that, you know, that doesn't look realistic like someone with a pencil couldn't do that. So we can do better, right? So what we're gonna do is go back to buffer and hit this draw Effects button down here, and then hit the gold star. And what you're going to get are these affect properties. Click on Outer Glow, then make sure it's highlighted. And then you can just what the defaults. You got. A two millimeter spread, the blur radius of 2.65, whatever. I'll just click Okay and hit Okay, and you can see how that works. So now you've got sort of that feed again, right? So we can increase that. Go back to our draw effects and play around, make sure Outer Glow, we spread that to four where radius of four opacity and we'll leave that at 50%. And hit Okay, Apply and Okay, and now, now it looks like that fade, right? So it kind of blends in. And if I could darken that up, but it looks like the watercolor artists kinda stayed away from there. And that's, That's how we do that. Right. So you could just leave it like that. Like if the word color artists did that afterwards and just wanted to warn or that hard edge, you could do that as well. But I kinda like the fade effect myself, so play around with that, but I think that looks a lot nicer. I might wear that up a little bit more, but you get the point. Play with it. Save it off when you're done and you're good to go. 9. Super Deluxe Labels: So these are your basic level labels. That's, that's great. They look pretty good. You could certainly go with that. But if you wanted to kind of customize them even more, there is another way, a little more complicated. This is more intermediate GIS stuff, but I think, I think you can handle it. Let's do it. If you want to just stop there, you can. But I've added in some more stuff here about deluxe labels, right? So if you recall, there was a deluxe labeler shape file that I added. So let's add that into our project here, right? So we'll go to the Data Source manager, makes sure we're set to vector a. Over here on the left. Go find that deluxe labeler. Sources, deluxe labeler. Here's that shape file. Remember, or you can set this down here to shape file and make it simple. We're going to open that and add encloses. So now we have this deluxe label or it's an empty, empty shapefile, but we've got some attribute fields here. So what we're gonna do here is we have to set this up, oh, that we've got to set it up using the data to find overrides in order for it to work properly. But it's worth, it's worth it once you get it. Again, once you get it set saved in your project, you're gonna be good to go. So what we're gonna do is you're going to right-click and go to properties as we typically do labels. We're going to use single labels and standard stuff and go from there, right? So the text. What we're gonna do is use these data to find override boxes. All of these boxes are data defined override options. So I'm going to click on that and go to this field type over here. And let me get my head out of the way. Big head. Here we go. Alright, so the data to find overrides and go and set this to font size. So now it's gold, right? And it's LinkedIn. So it's going to be, these labels are gonna be set to ten by default. But if we use the data to find override, it's going to use whatever is in the attribute table, right? So I'm going to hit Okay? And let's, let's do what we did before. Get rid of the That's fine. Labels placement. This is a review from what we've already done it. Okay, so now if I create will turn off these other labels. And then let's create a deluxe label. Just so we, just, for illustration purposes. So now you'll see we've got a lot more things in here. We don't have them all set up yet, but we've gotten a lot more options. We're going to call this and tuck it. What's hashtag there? Tuck it sound. Even though I don't have the hashtag set up yet, so and then we'll do hit. Okay, alright, so there's Nantucket Sound. We need to deal with the hashtag. So wrap that on character hit. Okay, now it's going to do that. And so now we have this label, right, that's great. But if I go in and I go into my attribute table to show you really quickly how this works. Instead of if I go to Font Size and I set this to 30, except to 30. So the default, if I make another one, I call it C, that clinic ocean. And I leave it empty. It's going to default it to ten, but I added in 30. So, so that's how you can go into your attribute table. It'll use the defaults if it doesn't have anything. But if you enter in something into that column through an editing function, you can, you can change all that stuff. Not just the size, but we can do colors, right? So I'm gonna go in and go back to texts. Go to the text color. Use this data to find overwrite on my head's in the way again. Go to field type, font color. And then that's fine. That's not gonna do anything. For some of these. You need to go in and go to the attributes form. In this case, we're gonna go to the font color here and set this widget. So font color and then widget type, hit color and hit, Okay, now watch what happens when I go into my attribute table. I get a color picker. So I click on that and I'll get a, like a red, right? So now that turns red. So it'll be black as a default. But if I wanted to turn that red, I could do that. So if, you know this, this is useful if you have like water and you kinda want a river label. And you just want that to be blue because it's water. But you want things on the land to be black so they stand out. You can dial them in. Everything is in one shapefiles still. One labels, deluxe labeled or shapefile. So it's very portable. And you can change that, all that stuff around. And then we just need to just link these things up. Right, so we can do the buffer. I gave you a buffer. You got to turn that on activated buffer color. So we'll go to field type String Buffer color, and then the buffer size, size, again, field type, buffer size, buffer size, right? So that sets that in there. And the rotation, the rotation in where are we rotation placement, rotation is down here and root rotation there. So that set, so if I wanted to go in and rotate that label, Nantucket Sound, I could do. It's going to say like 90 degrees. Right? Now it's rotated 90 degrees though. So if you wanted to angle it to fit it into a harbor or something, maybe like up in here, you could change that rotation rather than creating a line. You know, you could, you could do another layer with just lines that curve, but trying to keep it simple. That's it. So those are the data defined. Labelings are super deluxe labels. So it gives you that, that basic setup in that shape file. So download that, use it, but understand that you need to hook it up to connect it, right? So click on whatever field those are. The texts. If I wanted to set the font, I could type in typing a font name and it would switch the font up just that one label, right? If we wanted to do italics, I mean, you could do a whole bunch of stuff. All of these data to find overrides could be, you know, controlled by the table, right? So there's a bunch of them, right? So you can really, really get complicated. You could also do it with your symbology. You'll get your symbology. They have data to find overrides as well. So you could set your color, your opacity on your, on your symbol labels, right? So kind of a cool tool, intermediate stuff, but if you want to just go with it, keep everything consistent, you can keep it simple and just use the label field, create a new one or use this, the deluxe one. And I think you'll be happy that you did. I know once I figured this out, my class Carlson video helped me out. You're going to use it all the time and it'll be worth it. It just takes your car tire area to the next level, because as I mentioned, labeling is crucial to look at these things. So the better you can get at tweaking those little details, the better off you're gonna be, the better your map is going to look. And that's what we're after. Alright, cool. 10. Layouts: Alright, let's work on getting these onto a piece of paper, right? So I've improved these, these labels a little bit. They were bugging me. So anyway, so let's move this to paper. So go to project layouts. I already have one setup, but go to New Print Layout. And we're going to call this size hit. Okay? And you'll get this sort of the layout view, the paper view, I suppose the other way to say it represents that the piece of paper that I'm working on, we're gonna make sure this is set to letter size. So I right-click on here and go to Page Properties. And I get all the different sizes here that are available. You can also hit Custom and dial it in whatever size paper you want. In our case letters here. So switches it to an eight-and-a-half by 11 piece of paper, which is what we want. So we're good to go. So, alright, so this is the paper we're working with. What I like to do is setup guides. So I'm going to click the guides tab here and then add a horizontal guide, a 1 ". And you can set these or whatever you want. If you want to do a half-inch margin, you could. And we'll do another one at 1 " vertically, right? So there's 1 " on that side and that side horizontally, I'm going to add in another one at this is 7.5. Here we go. That's the one down here at the bottom of an inch less than 8.5. And then here we're gonna go, we need 10 " and inches. Alright, so now we have a one-inch margin all the way around to help guide us. So to add in the work that we just did, we're going to add a map. It's this, this Add button here, kind of a blank look and piece of paper. It will snap onto your guides and I can see a little tiny red X show up and we drag it in there and it snaps in. There we go. We have our map, gives us a blue background as a default, and then just go back to item properties. Let's turn that background off. So here we go. We have our, our map here. Now what we wanna do is use a watercolor background, right? So we're going to use the one provided with the course for now. If you wanted to build one on an iPad or go download one, some funky drippy watercolor it wherever you want, right? It's great. You can go download these jpegs at a lot of places and add them in wherever you want. So if you have an iPad with a pencil, you can draw them or download them. I'm going to use the one provided. So I'm going to add picture. Again, snap it in. And it's going to give me this dialogue over here. I'm gonna hit raster image and then these three buttons. And that's going to tell him asked me where to go to get that picture. Right. So you got to remember where you saved your stuff. Here we have the blue watercolor raster fill. I'm going to open that and it's covering everything up, which is okay and it's not quite all the way down. If you go to re-size mode and hit stretch, that will stretch all the way down. And then the order up here matters. So we'll drag that underneath. So here we go. We've got our watercolor background image with our feet, nice and our faith around our text. I think I need to zoom in a little bit, I think. So I'm gonna go to the Select Move tool, make sure that map is selected and my scale is at 02:20, 9082, I'm going to shrink, make it larger. So zoom in a little bit. 200, 200,000. That looks good. We could when AT whatever, wherever you want. But I think that fills the screen pretty well. If I want to scoot your ionic is kinda move it with that move tool. And I think that looks just about right. There you go. So now you have your map on a piece of paper, right? If you wanted to add a vignette around there, you could, if you wanted to add in some texts, you can do that as well. So we'll use a text box and we'll just call this TOC it. And we'll go center and middle, and then font. And I'm going to change this to that same Lusitania handwriting that I like. And the size, I'm going to make this like 50 or something. Here we go. Make that fit. Alright, so there we go. So now, nice label, it's probably a little bit large, but we can fix that. If I want to add a scale bar. Draw that in as a box. I'm going to use the line ticks up scale bar. I'm going to set it to miles because I'm an American and we don't like these kilometers. Want to add, make that larger. I'm going to add them. You can't just stretch it out. You got to add a little more precisely going to add some segments to the right, right. So now I have 10 mi, that's about right. So that's much better. I can put a border around that, frame it up. Right now I got a black line. And you can see this is more, there's a lot you can do when this layout section. What I did was pretty pretty I'm pretty quickly another Skillshare class that I do on intro to QGIS, which goes into the options. More. I would change the font down here to match so, but that's your layout. Pretty straightforward. Oh, one more thing. I want to add that watercolor paper to the background. That paper look. I'm going to add another picture, stretch it around the whole piece of paper, and go to Raster image again and click on watercolor paper. Click Open. Stretch that. And this one's a little trickier because we need to, we need to multiply that effect. So let me move my big head out of the way here in 1 s. Here we go. So rather than it's already at bottom, I mean, I may, I may. Sometimes I like to rename these, make it easier. If I move it all the way to the bottom, it's covered. It's not it's not, you can't really see it on the actual paper itself. You can see it around the edge because there's nothing there. So what I wanna do is on that map image, you know, you could do it this way. I go to map image and then down to rendering and hit instead of the blending mode, set that to multiply. That'd be one way. I'm not crazy about that. Let's go back to normal and put that paper on the top again. And multiply that. So normal multiply. And now you can see I've got that feed. The paper is fading in to everything, right? So now it looks like it's on paper. So that little extra, that paper effect on the bottom really kind of makes it a lot for, you know, pretty, pretty quick so that pages in your resources so you can, you can use that. And now we really looked like we were real, were real watercolor artists, right? So there you go. There's your ears, your layout. Let's go. 11. Using Procreate and an IPad Background Images: Alright, I'm going to create a watercolor background with my iPad. Now you may not have an iPad, in which case this isn't really going to be relevant. But what I like to do, I have an iPad. What it is, it's probably four years old with Procreate on it and I've got the pencil that goes along with it. And sometimes what if I want to make a custom watercolor background? I'll use this transported over and I'll show you that. So I've been procreate now and I'm going to create a new canvas. And I'm gonna go with whatever format I'm using. Let's do a 19 by 13 Canvas. So that's where we have set up now, right? So really, you know, pretty simple, just, just create a new document. And then what I'm gonna do is go in and grab some watercolor brushes. I've got many, many procreate brushes that come with it and I've downloaded some others as well. But I'm gonna go into my water color lines and use this here and use whatever, whatever you like and choose a color. Let's go with some sort of a blue. Choose a color by tapping on the color wheel and go with that blue. Now, now I just kinda draw it in a U, whatever kind of image I want. And I can push harder. And it, you know, the, the pressure sensitivity of the pencil works really well. And I can kind of pick wherever I want or I can do other other types. Right. And all depends. So this is just kind of trial and error. Find a something that you like. You know, there's crazy amount of different styles that you can do or even start to feed in colors as well. I typically don't get this fancy, but if I wanted to do something crazy, I could do that. And you know, what a bit of a Procreate lesson is probably worthwhile. Kind of get familiar with it. And I can change the settings on this over to the left here. Let's make that nice and large and do whatever I want, right? If I want to get super artistic, I will go over to the procreate with the pencil and do that. Okay, so I'm done with that. I'll go to hit the actions. The little wrench up there on the upper left, hit share. And I will export that as a JPEG. Could use a PNG or tiff tube. Typically, I'll just use a jpeg unless there's some transparency involved, and then I'll use the PNG, but, you know, and it exports it out. I use Dropbox and sends it over to my computer. I'm pretty short order, so that's how I do it. And then I will have that image ready to go. And I can just load that up in a dump that into my background's folder and create any background file that I want. So there you go. 12. Thank You: So thank you for joining me. I appreciate you spending some time here with me figuring this stuff out. It's a lot of fun, I enjoy it and I think you're gonna make some cool stuff. I can't wait to see the stuff in the project section. I'll be sure to look at it and give you a comment. If you have any questions along the way, you can reach me through the Skillshare system. Happy to help. And if you have any other maps that you want to get done that you just want to have me do it for you and we can do that to go to my website there, it's got loose your maps.com and get links to my Etsy store and stuff and some of the other stuff that you know, some inspiration or button or I can just help you, help you through the process, whatever works. So that is all again, please leave a review. Skillshare runs on reviews are important to everybody, so appreciate that and don't be a stranger, feel free to reach out. And again, thank you very much.