Illustrated Maps in Procreate

1. Introduction: I want to tell you what is so fun about creating illustrated maps. You have the power to add only the elements that you wish to add, creating a unique view of an area otherwise known for other types of landmarks. We have all seen examples of these types of maps, they are like eye candy. Let me tell you, visually stimulating map illustrations can be achieved by choosing simplicity or heavy detail and focusing on a particular color palette perhaps. You can also have a unique map by creating a theme of something more specific, oftentimes this is found in designed maps with a focus on themes like popular landmarks, historical sites, or a city's best-of guide. You might also stumble upon a hidden gem or two. I'm Peggy Dean, an author, artist, educator, and founder of The Pigeon Letters, a resource haven. In this class, we will be diving into creating maps using Procreate on the iPad. Of course, you can work along with any other digital program or even analog, if you're an analog worker, not to worry, I will have tips for you along the way. Join me as we explore choosing your maps' special location, highlighting unique elements and landmarks, referencing memories of experiences or travel. This part's my favorite, incorporating illustrative elements, calling out location with simple lettering, and also selecting unique color palettes. When you finish this class, you will have a special story within the map that you've created and you will be able to share it with the world. I can't wait to see what you do with yours. Let's jump in. 2. Materials & Class Project: Welcome to the class. I am so happy you decided to jump into this fun project-based exploration of map illustration. As you may have guessed, the materials for this class are straight forward. You will need your iPad, your Apple Pencil or any other stylus that you use, and the Procreate app. You are welcome to use other digital software of your choosing, of course. We will be working in layers to best optimize the organization and effects of our illustrated maps. So if you can use a software with layer options that will be best. If you want to follow along also with analog techniques, there are no boundaries. Simply follow the simple steps and add the medium of your choice. By the end of the class, you will have your very own unique map that holds a special meaning to you or highlights the top spots of a place of your choosing. I am super eager to jump into this fun exploration with you. Without further ado, grab your iPad and let's draw. 3. Planning Your Map: The first thing that we want to do is actually find our map. If you're on a computer, if you have an atlas, or if you are just on the iPad like I am, I am going to source exactly where my map is. This is just the very basics. I'm going to open maps, and I put in Wyoming because I know that this is a trip I recently took and I really want to highlight the spaces that I loved which Yellowstone was a big part of it. Also Grand Tetons, and then the Glacier National Park. What I could do is focus on this part of Montana coming through to Wyoming. We don't have to have these harsh edges, But when we're planning this stage out, I like to look at an actual map. I like to screenshot it. Or what you can do if you're working analogue, you can take a map either print one from a computer, grab an atlas, and then you can use either a light box or a window and just tape that up and trace it from there. On the iPad, this is how I am going to work. I'm just going to screenshot this area because I know that's the area I want, and then I'll crop this stuff out that I don't need. I'll just go to about here because that's what I'm going to want, and then I'll just say Done, Save to Photos. If you didn't know how to screenshot on the new one, it's the top two buttons, and then I believe on the old one, it's the home button while pressing the side button. My own and I can double-check on that. Once I have my map, I'm going to open Procreate and you can open anything that you're used to creating on. I use Procreate. I'm going to go to the canvas size that I want, and I like to make my canvases like 12 by 16, 300 DPI. You can choose any canvas size that you like to work in. I just find that this is a good one for me. I'm actually going to turn it sideways. Then I'm going to import that image that I screenshot. I go to Tools, Insert a Photo, grab that screenshot and I'll make it a little bit larger so I can see what I'm doing. I'm going to make this look pretty organic, so I don't need it to be perfectly straight. If you do care about that, you want to go from one of the corners to make it larger, and it'll stay according to scalar, exactly up and down, it's not going to tilt at all, whereas if I do this, it could tilt. I don't care because I'm not, again, I'm making this look more organic. Once I have this, what I'm going to do is go to my layer panel, create a new layer, grab just a sketching pencil, Procreate has a great one I use. Where is it? Sketching. Under sketching I use 6B. I'm going to use blue. It really stands out when I'm working with other stuff. What I'm going to do is trace the state lines, so that this is my first. Again, if you'd like them to be perfect, if you're working with analog, you can use a ruler. If you're working with Procreate, you can drag and hold, and it'll snap into that perfect line if that's your thing. This particular map is actually not great at showing straight lines because all of these lines tend to be a little bit light. But see, I went off wrong thing because they blend together, but I'll get it. I'm not super particular with them because I like to have mine fade off the edges. I'm not going to make this perfect. It's just not really my style to make anything too perfect. We're looking for a red lines here. That goes straight up. That makes it easy. Now, once I have that, if I turn my map layer off, you'll see that I have my preliminary sketch. Now I want to highlight the areas that I care to include. I obviously want to include names of cities that are prominent. I don't know if I'm going to stay with all of these things in Idaho, but for now I'll say Twin Falls, say Idaho Falls. Then here I definitely want to highlight Glacier, I know it's a National Park. I'll say, Missoula, Helena. I like to include main roads, so I will just draw those in like this and I'm totally good with, that's totally off. I'm good with having it go through my letters. If I turn my map layer off, see how this one will stop and then continue. Personal style. You might want to put your city name off to the side, but this is how I like to do it. I'm not going to put these smaller roads in because my focus on my map is not so city, it's more landmarks in nature. That's more of what I like to focus on, but maybe you have, if you're highlighting awesome restaurants that you visited or something that's when this would be more applicable to put all these roads end so that you're focused on city. But I'm just putting them in real quick. Again, this is just your sketch, so don't think it has to be perfect. Don't worry too much about how your lines work or if one's not as thick as the other, it does not matter at this point. Once those are essentially, that doesn't look right. There we go. Once those are placed, now I want to highlight specific actual landmarks. I know this is Yellowstone, but let's get into Yellowstone. What I might end up doing is focusing mostly on this area. Right now I'm giving myself this space to work on more, but I'm going to really focus on the area that I care about the most. Sometimes I'll make a second layer for this and I'll make it red just to separate it. Now, I'm going to actually go to Google and look up Yellowstone National Park, so that I can see a layout. Actually, I'm going to say map. There we go. I can see a layout of exactly what I want to highlight in the national parks. Look at images, grab a map from there. This gives me a much better breakdown. I basically want that map so that I can highlight it on my map. I'm in Google, I can just save this image, and then I can go to my map again. I'll go to this layer here because when I import a new photo, it'll go on top of that one on its own layer. This is a tricky part because you have to line them up. What I do is I decrease the opacity on the one that I just put in, and then I have to really pay attention and see where that lines up. It's probably not going to be that big actually. Unique that larger, move that see Yellowstone right right here. That's going to be pretty small. I think I have this pretty good. I have the opacity on, but then I see that my road is lining up with the road underneath that yellow road and then I have my border which says Montana, Wyoming on my blue line. This is right. I can set that in place and then go to my layer 3 where I'm adding the additional details here. I don't care about Visitors Center, I care about the landmarks. I'm going to just for now make a note that this is where Old Faithful is. Make that larger because I think I need it to be larger Old Faithful. Then what else do I have here? I'm just going to go up and find those spaces that I really loved, then I want to showcase, but also I want to put in these lakes and whatnot. I'm going to do a really quick trace of that and mention what it is Shoshone lake. Because I love including the lakes, Lewis Lake. Can't really read that. You have to also keep in mind if you're working digitally that your zoom in might be actually really really small. That's something to note. I don't want to smash stuff together, because when my map is smaller what I'm visualizing is that I know Old Faithful is this tiny little dot, but I'll probably draw it about this big, because this is like an overall map that I want to look at a distance and see these highlighted spaces of things that I love. I loved the artist's paint pots. I loved them so much. It was one of my favorite aspects, and it's literally just like a bubbling circle of clay looking stuff. Then when it's this small, I'll probably draw that element about this big so that I know that that's where it was. Then the lake, I might take that and enlarge it just a little bit so that I can have that be more focused and then same with these lakes. That's the thing about illustrated maps, is that they don't have to be so accurate, they are pieces of art. Lamar Valley was really significant to me because we saw so many bison. If I look at my map as a whole, I would probably want to do a bison or two right here right are that big and then I can just make a note that that's Lamar Valley because we saw a ton there. If you like, I'll come back to Yellowstone as I work on it more. But that's where I want to keep that for now. Mammoth Hot Springs, just because it is main attraction here. Glacier is another one. I want to go back to Google. I'm going to say Glacier National Park images. I want to say map because I don't want those beautiful pictures, I just want the map. Here's this map, and this one one really show us the roads so well. That's something to keep in mind when you're finding landmark maps. It's going to be helpful to actually see the surroundings, and there's a border somewhere. Border closed. Here's my border. There was whitefish. This is about where whitefish is, so that looks approximate. So that will work for me. I'm going to decrease the opacity a little bit so it's not so harsh and then go back to layer 3, which is where my red was. Once I have this part down, what I want to do is actually take this whole area and this might make some of you crunch you are a perfectionist. But I'm going to enlarge it quite a bit and I'm doing this again because I'm able to really focus on what was really drawing us there when we were there. The other one is I'm going to take this section and enlarge that a little bit, not a lot, just enough to as a map as a whole, I can isolate and really focus on those things that I loved. Then I could scoot some of this over to the left and have it be a little bit closer so it's not so far off. I decided that I'm not going to include some of these cities, like this one is going to take away from what I'm trying to achieve with focusing here. What I want to do is really highlight all the natural-like nature areas that we may or may not have seen. But since this map is going to be an isolation of these spaces of nature, this is what happens when I try to think and talk. I'm going to look up landmarks that are there specifically. I'm going to look up Montana. I'll just say nature landmarks, Montana, so that I can just have that be a focus. I don't want tourist attractions, but let's go through guys. Here's Glacier Park, I obviously have in there. That will be something where I do draw like a mountain. Maybe I'll put some trees in, let's see what else is natural through here. Big Sky Resort is maybe something I want to keep in mind. If you do landmarks like this, like I have one that I did of Nashville where I did include some more buildings and things like that. That's something that you could totally do too, just depending on what you want to include. Here's one that's really cool. Lewis and Clark Caverns State Park. It looks like I could draw some caverns. I'll look that up, Lewis and Clark Caverns State Park. That looks like it is approximately on the bottom right of my other isolated area. So that might be perfect just outside of Bozeman. Rather than Bozeman, I'm not going to put bow I'm actually going to put Lewis and Clark Cavern. What is it? Caverns State park. Because it's cool and so I'll probably just do a cavern and then some lettering with that. I want to show you another trick. I'm back in my Maps app and I did this actually recently when I was planning a road trip. I just went in and looked up national and then you see forests, national parks, things like that. It actually will highlight a whole bunch of areas that you might not have been aware of like Ponderosa State Park is in Idaho. Big Horn. Things like that will help you as you start to map this out more. I'm also going to try mountains nearby and then it'll show you, it'll isolate those. Waterfall. Let me see if there's anything here. We have a few waterfalls going on. This is where already it's so much more detailed. So I would go to that and so I got out of the Montana search. I have this search up or like this area. As long as you're in the area and you look those things up like mountains, if I can spell, it doesn't even want to auto-correct my bad typing. Then it will show you this stuff and then I can click on it and then I'll see actual images to see like is this something I want to include? The thing to keep in mind too though, is that is this overlapping the area that you're looking for? I actually need to be looking not so much in this area, but outside of that area to see what I can isolate so like let's see what Shoshone Falls. That's really extravagant. That's something I'll totally put in there because I have Idaho on my map right here and Shoshone Falls. Having a waterfall image or illustration right here will take up that space and be really nice. Then you're focusing more on those types of areas. Go down that route as well and then snag some areas. If you're doing a wilderness type of thing like I'm, this will help you fill out those empty spaces. 4. Referencing Memories: If you are one to pull out or to do travel journaling as you're traveling, this is a great time to pull it out because it's also going to make sure that not only are you isolating the spaces that you visited that you really loved, but it's also going to help you remember stuff that you might want to include on your map to make it even more special to you and personal to you. That's something that I had started doing in 2020 because we were doing more road trips, and adding latitude and longitude is really fun. Just an FYI, this travel journal is by Bobo Design Studio. It's called the Wanderlust Passport. It's really fun because it keeps the space that you can write in, all this stuff. But anyway, yeah, if you keep notes of that kind of stuff, then this will help you remember your experiences and say, like, "Oh yeah, I wanted to include that." For example, we went kayaking on Two Oceans Lake and we had the whole lake to ourselves. I left some of my mom's ashes here. So I'm going to make sure that I include that in Grand Teton's, down here. I'm just going to make a note. I know it's on the right side of the park. So Two Oceans Lake, because that was really magical for us, and I want to include that. We went from this temperate state park into this desert out of nowhere. It was like coming out of Boise, so those canyons. This was something different. Okay. Basically, I saw a couple of items in here that I wouldn't have included otherwise. So I'm really happy that I referenced that so I do recommend doing that. After you're done mapping stuff out, we'll move into adding the elements that we want to include as we start actually building what this is going to look like. 5. Drawing Illustrative Elements: At this point, we don't need our math guide anymore. I'm going to keep mine just so I have it. But I'm going to turn that later off. Because now we're going to focus on our illustrative elements. That's out of here. This is going to allow us to fill this up the way that we want to, the way that we want to. This is an opportunity to shift things over, kind of let them fill out the way that they should. If it needs to scoot over a little bit to allow for another item, maybe you might find that it will fill in the areas that are more sparse. If you're working analogue, then I would just recommend taking like a new piece of paper on top of your sketch and using that with a light box or a window to continue. Or tracing paper is good too. You could do a couple rounds of tracing paper. Which is essentially what we're doing with these layers working digitally. Now, what I want to do is focus on the items that will accompany this stuff. I'm going to create a new layer. I'm going to turn both of these layers down, the opacity that's going to help me focus on the layer I'm on. This is just going to let me see like what's where. I'm not going to worry about borders. This is more like focusing on objects now. I know that what this lake and waterfall it's going to look like a lake and a waterfall. I am going to go into actually inking. You could use whatever ink brush you want. If you're in Procreate, I really like the dry ink brush. I also have a set that I've created specifically for how I want the ink to show up as I am working. You can snag that. I've linked that resource in the project section so that you can snag that with ease. I'm going to use TPL natural ink. I need to make sure I'm on the new layer. It just looks like this. It's got a nice grit to it, but it is still, a nice solid line. The first thing that I do is, I want to check the size of my brush. If I was to draw a lake right here, I want to see in the big picture, is that the right size that I would want that to look like. Because if I'm right here and I'm drawing all these little details, like I have this really detailed illustration and then I zoom out and it's super teeny tiny, that's not going to be what I want. The very first thing that I do, and this goes for analog too like your pen size matters. I'd say the pigeon letters, using those an O5 would be good. But an O3 would also be good. That's a good size for me when I shrink it down. This is where that lake can go and then I can also add in a waterfall. I might add like a little cliff right here that has a waterfall coming down into that lake. That's where I can start. That's because it's on a transparent one. That's when I can go in and have this kind of meet and have it kind of bubble up. Remember these are really tiny illustration so you want to make sure that they're really bold from a distance. If I make that from a distance, it's a believable waterfall, when I add in color. Now, I know that that is Holon Lake falls and also Holon Lake. I can title that whatever I want. But I'm not going to get to that point yet because all I'm working on for now is the illustrative elements to make sure those are all spaced out nicely before we get into actually adding lettering. Because that's more of a complimentary thing. We want this to be focused on illustration. I think I'm actually going to do like this too. I want it to look more like a lake. I might add some trees in here that I can draw in. They look giant, but remember, when you make them small, they're just those extra elements. Of course you can also do your illustrations anyway that you want to. The first map that I was really happy with that I did in this style I ended up doing trees that had a lot more like branches involved. For some reason today I've chosen to do trace this in this form. There's not like a right right wrong. You could even do trees that are just like triangles with nubs at the bottom. It's your illustrations so make it yours. Go with your style, do what feels good. I'm going to do another set of trees right here because I just want it to really represent the nature. That's going to flow as a theme throughout this whole map. For example, over in this area, while it might be pretty empty, I can add all these trees. These are like obviously not realistic looking trees but then they're not supposed to be. They're just supposed to be like fillers. I don't know what that is. When or where did you learn to draw a tree, Peggy? Fillers for that space. It's a little bit large so I'm going to shrink it. Another thing to remember is that you don't have to put a lot of emphasis on details because we're going to be putting in color that can do that for us. The cavern situation, that's something I want to use a reference for. I can open my internet browser over here and I can look up Lewis and Clark Caverns State Park and just look at images. This is really cool. I'm going to try my best in a very small, small illustration to replicate this in an illustrative way. We'll see if it's doable. How big are we here? They're here and here. I'm going to make it about this tall and I'm just going to create these wavy lines and come down and then maybe add some ridges just with some mark making so that when it's small it looks more believable. In fact, I'm going to undo this and do it again. Because I think they need to be a lot skinnier for it to be what it's supposed to be. Then I've got this one next to it that looks kind of like its layered. Or these like droopy, weird hanging looking things. It's not going to look perfect, but it's a really small illustrations. It really doesn't matter too much. Then I'll do some more of these guys just to make it look like it's supposed to. When I add color, it'll look a little more intentional and that's real small. It'll represent what I want it to represent, plus, it's going to have its name next to it so that's going to help me a lot because then, you'll know what it is instead of having to guess that this is not a Disneyland ride. I'm just going to shrink that up a little bit. That seems fine because I don't want to put too much detail in there since they're going to be really itty-bitty. I'm going to go to my next area here, Mammoth Hot Springs. So I'll look up Mammoth Hot Springs and see what that looks like with an image, not maps, from a distance. I might just do stacks of panels and then maybe some steam, maybe a couple of ridges like this and then make that more of a lake thing. Then from here, I can just add those ridges are here and then this is water and then just make some steam coming off of it. Okay, so that looks about right. I'm just going to look up bison so I can see we're nice and close and see how I might go about drawing this guy. If I do him that way, so I'm going to actually turn these mountains around because his back slopes down that way and I don't want the mountains to slope and him to slope, that would be weird. Okay, that direction. This is just my brain. I've got his little head. How small is that? That's pretty small. I might go a little bit larger. Oops, I'll go a little bit larger here and draw his little horns. You guys, since these are so small really, it's like accentuate, give him that scruffy little haircut and then his little eyes, his cutie pie nose, and his cutie pie beard. I will give him his little back slope and then get him his little furry leg. They're so cute. Come down and then his back leg here and then his little tail. All right, that's fine. He's really tiny. We don't have to look at these details everybody. He's cute. His head's a little bit large but he's cute. I'm going to fix and make his head just a smidge smaller. There we go. Perfect, perfect bison. Artists Paintpots, I'm going to look that up just for reference. Basically, it's like a circle that bubbles out and has steam. I'm just going to do this. Let's see how big that is, that works, and this size. Then I'm going to have to get rid of this side because I want to really accentuate these bubbles. Well, obviously they're not this huge. It will be small. Everything needs to be more dramatic. Sometimes there'd be some that would shoot up, so I think that might be fun to incorporate, so just like little splashes. Sure, that could be a splash and then some steam. I know what it is. Then I'll just add some little detail around it. I guess not that. The ground around it was really cracked and so I'm just going to create that surrounding so it's like this awesome geothermic situation. The other one that I wanted to put on here was the Grand Prismatic. First, I'm going to see where that is on the map itself. Just a lot larger area because this really took up a big space and then it just was continuing in layers and layers and it was so cool. I can make that real colorful and then I want to add some steam coming off of that and then I'll do Old Faithful. We actually went to the visitor center to go to the bathroom, which was a mistake because there were a ton of people there even during the pandemic and we weren't going to stay to watch it go off but then we just so happened to be there when it went off so we saw it. Old Faithful, I'm going to drop just a little bit lower so that I can get it to reach up higher. So I'm just going to create these movements here, just have it splash off, splash off, and call it good. See how simple that is though and I'm going to move the Grand Prismatic so that it's not just right on top of it, and I'll move it and then I'll move my Paintpots up. This is where, as you draw these illustrative elements, you can move things around and you might have to do that with pencil if you erase something and then put it over a little bit if you're working analogue, which is totally fine. There we go. That's much more separated, which is nice. Then Yellowstone Lake is this entire area. I decided I don't want things to look so topographic, is that a word? So I'm going to do the lake like this and just add some trees in. I feel pretty good about Yellowstone at this moment so I'm going to move down to Grand Tetons. For Grand Tetons, it's like a mountain range that's all connected and it's got this really cool ridge. So I'm just going to draw a ridge basically, so just a peak, peak, peak, peak, peak, and down. That's all I wanted to do and then I am going to put in Two Ocean Lake and I know that that's a way further over than it actually is, but remember, that's what we need to do. I'm going to do another waterfall. I'm going to have it go the opposite direction just so that we don't have that exact same thing happening, just a little cliff, water bubbling up. Maybe get rid of this line and then I'll move that over to the right a little bit just so it's not completely perfectly stacked with the other one. [inaudible] get so much smaller though because I really went crazy on that one. Boise River, I have this in here because rather than Boise, I'm going to focus on Boise River and it's because we went on a bike ride for so long along the Boise River Greenbelt and it was so much fun and so I'm just going to do just a river with some trees around it. It was like the perfect day. Then our canyons that we loved so much. I'm actually going to use my own picture as a reference on that one because I have this one that's basically like the scene we kept seeing over and over was this and it's just so pretty. So I think I'll just do two hills and then through it, all these really cool canyons in the background over the horizon. What do I have left? I have Lake McDonald. I've got all these lakes at Glacier Park so I think what I'll do is I'm just going to do one big lake and then maybe one off to the side a little bit because I have this one right down below it and so I don't need to really go crazy with the lakes. I also want to feature Going-to-the-Sun Road. We drove up there and it was incredible. It was the most beautiful thing we've ever, ever seen. Helena National Forest. I'll just do some hills and then maybe a body. I won't do a body of water just because there's one right next to it so I'll just have these hills in here and that will be national park. From here, we can test it by turning off those two guides and seeing how that looks. That looks pretty spread open overall to me. So now, we're going to get into the next portion which is putting in the actual lettering or font or whatever you're going to use to name all of the elements that you just illustrated. 6. Labeling with Lettering or Font: Now when we're naming, this is something I want to do on a totally different layer also, and if it helps you to name these, I totally would. These are my illustrations. This one's going to be our lettering or our titles, whatever you want to call this, it might be font. You can add font. If you're using analog, you could scan this in and out font. I will say, even if you're not a hand letterer, don't underestimate the power of handwriting. I'm not going to be doing beautiful hand lettering. I've done that on maps before, and while it does look really pretty, it doesn't have the aesthetic that I personally want in what I'm doing. This natural ink brush that I used for this, that's great for illustration, but it might, when something is small like this, make it so that your letters are harder to read. So I actually switched over to my MonoPigeon brush. It's just a monoline brush, it's free on my website, linked that for you as well. I'm just going to use that. For here, the main things to keep in mind are, let's say you have a whole bunch of national parks or something, don't write national right here and then abbreviate it here. You want them to be pretty then you want them to be consistent. So if I was to write mountains and I wrote mts, keep that consistent instead of writing mountains for another one. Not the biggest deal, but it might bother you later. This is Going-to-the-Sun Road. One thing I do want to mention too, though, this is a great time to add a guide, unless you like lettering to be cocked over, not perfect. Even though this is like nothing is perfect, it's all scattered, I do like the lettering aspect of my maps to be nice and clean, so I do turn on a Drawing Guide for that, and you just go to Canvas, Drawing Guide. You can edit it also and change the grid size to whatever you want. I usually just use it to help me focus on the main line. If you need that and you're using an analog thing, you could take a piece of lined paper and put that underneath what you're doing to help you use that as a guide with a lightbox or window. I like to keep my lettering also looking consistent, so if I'm doing something like this, then I want it to be really consistent the whole way. I also just put a few letters down to see how I'm going to like that with the size. You can play with your lettering style if you're not using a font. You'll notice as you are writing stuff in, I recommend going smaller again and again to see the size because this size is way too big for what I want to do. So I'm actually going to utilize my Drawing Guide and make that grid a lot smaller so that it is the size that I want it to be. That looks a lot better. It looks really small, but it will be readable. I'm using a really clean brush. I'm not going to do any extra flourishes or serifs or anything. Font's great, but when you're doing it by hand, there's a lot more imperfections, so it's a lot harder to read, so that's why I want to keep this nice and clean. Going-to-the-Sun Road. That size looks a lot better for me. Now, I will speed this up so you don't have to watch every single thing I'm doing. I also was going in and as I was writing these, I was separating them. They were all spaced out a little differently. I also took the main attraction and made those a little bit larger. So you can do that to highlight the main stuff while labeling the other stuff and then they don't get lost, make it bigger or just add some emphasis like this. I'm just going to keep mine actually pretty plain. From here, I'm going to turn off my Drawing Guide because it's super distracting. Done with this part. You've got your writing in here. Notice that even though I just wrote it with handwriting with the capital letters, it still looks really cute. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, so that's just my example. I'm still using my guides because now, I'm going to add the borders of the regions that I've drawn. The reason why I like to do this after I do my illustrations and after I do my lettering is so that the borders don't end up running through those other elements and I have to keep erasing them or whatever, so that's why I wait till the end. We'll do that in this next segment. 7. Drawing Borders & Roads: Now we're going to move into creating our actual borders and roads and things like that. The reason that I wait until the end of drawing in my illustrations and also my lettering is so that way I don't have those borders or roads running into any of these other elements of my map as I'm trying to draw them and then having to erase the roads or the borders over and over. This just lets me keep that guide and then I can wait until the end. That's what I'm going to do now. I'm just going to use the same brush in Procreate that I was using before, which was my ink pack in the national ink, I'm going to create a new layer. Now I'm going to just go over this border. The nice thing about my particular borders that it is pretty square, so it would look nice as is like a flat map. But I know that my personal style happens to be more of where it fades out. I'm going to see how this goes and see what I want to do as I put my color in, but for right now I will just start to draw those edges. As I draw the edges, you'll see I'm going to make them a little bit thinner just with less pressure. You'll see that what I'm doing is going into this space, but then just coming out the other side. So I'm not drawing through it, I'm just hovering and then going through to the next part. Same thing here and then it stops here and then there's this little corner. I'm not going to worry about this little corner because it's got so much going on that if I throw this in there, it just looks like it's getting lost in part of that illustration. I'm just going to get the corner of this in here and then I do want to have my state border. I'm going to drop the word Lamar Valley down because I don't want it just sitting on that border. I'm going to split that up into two lines Lamar Valley. There we go, and then go back to my border layer. I raise that just a smidge higher because A, my map is not accurate as far as being specifically where it should be and B, I wanted there to be some breathing room in between those two mountains. There is, however, a border straight through here. Because I have plenty of room that's not interrupting anything else. It's not that big. I can put my border there without it looking like it's getting lost in the illustration. If it did look like it was getting lost, I could figure out how I can move that the words around which I've had to do many times. Sometimes that also means moving the illustration and that's totally fine. I'm going to bring this one in and then bring this border through like so. Notice if your lines don't perfectly connect or they go over a little bit, that's something that can just add to the character. It looks like this needs to come up just a little bit more. It can add to the character a little bit. If you want it to be perfect, you can always erase, use the straight line that we talked about. Some states don't have straight lines. They're right here. It doesn't. Here's another border that I want to make sure I include though, right through here. I just put that inside a little bit more so that I can have my texts, but my word stay there and then I'm not going to do my roads yet. Because I do that actually with color and I'll show you what that looks like as we get into it. But so now my borders are in there. I can see what that looks like. If I turn off my guides, I'm starting to look like I actually have three states going on. You'll also notice that it does look a little bit sparse right here. I'm going to use that technique that I love to do, which is to come off and fade this away. It's not going to take away from the illustration at all. It's just going to enhance what I actually want to be focused on. Then that state is still there. I might do the same thing actually down here a little bit, we'll see maybe fully. But yeah, so it's going to look nice and if you opt to do something like that as well, then you'll see what I mean and it'll make more sense. For roads, I like to make them really thin and I like to have lines on each side. You could just have them in a different color or just have thinner lines. Whatever works for you. I just personally do them this way. It does take a little bit longer, but it's just the way that I like to do it. The first line is always the faster one and then the second one you have to try to match it up. Or you could cheat and go and grab a section of the road and then copy paste, and then just move it slightly so that you have, I don't like that because then it does stuff like this where it's not leaving the white space the whole in. But whatever you want to do is perfect. That's the answer. I didn't put anything for billings and so I'm just going to have this road continue. Plus I like it when both sides don't really match up because it just looks more organic to me. I'm going to stop that road actually about right here because I don't know. It goes up through here and I just don't want that to get lost or something and then I just end up rounding out the road so it doesn't look like it just stops abruptly. The I'm just using a lot lighter pressure so that these are thinner lines. Again, you can totally use I don't know what happened there. Then like that. But you can use just one lighter line, a different color. You can make your roads stand out, however, works whatever works with your style, this is just what I like to do. It's what I'm going to do. Then I don't have many focused roads, so I feel that is about good, no I have that one. I feel that's about good. I might just throw in this one just because we did so much driving around Yellowstone. That's just a fun little memory since that road is already in there. Is that even a road. No. That's the border of the Yellowstone. I'm just going to throw in my own road, however I want it to look. Because I remember driving and driving and driving and it was so much fun. I don't usually like driving but Yellowstone is such a fun drive through if you haven't done it. Turning my guides off, that's what that's looking like, which I love. Next segment we're going to go into color and this is when this stuff comes to life. 8. Adding Color: When it comes to color, the first thing that I like to do is think about the actual color palette that I'll be using because it's such a fun element to creating these maps. If you want to, like for whatever reason you want to make everything pink, or if you have some really cool wild color palette in mind, it's always really fun to visit that. So if you can create a color palette ahead of time, it's going to work really well for you because then you don't have to do all that thinking later. So I'm just using this color palette I've created in the past. I really like warm greens. I'm not sure what quite happened here, but my recording was not working during this first color apart, but it's actually really easy and it would have been really boring to have launched it. So essentially what I do is I separate layers for colors by what they are. So I could say blue, but I said water, so that's all of my blue, my trees, all of my green, I don't have to do it this way. Things are pretty separated as they are, so they could be on the same layer and it wouldn't really affect much. But I just like to work really clean and these layers, so that's why I do it that way. So make sure that when you're doing color, they are all underneath, at the bottom of your layers. So I'm going to group all mine together just to make things a little bit easier. Then I can say these are my colors. So my color layers are all right here. If I turn those off, they are underneath my border lettering illustration. You don't have to group them. It's just for helping me, and then these are just some miscellaneous ones that I had separated and I didn't really want to have them all in their own single layer. The brush that I used for this is the pigeon letters watercolor opaque round brush. So I'll just show you what that looks like. Let's get this bigger. So the brush is similar to watercolor. So it's got the translucent or transparent version of it is exactly the same. It's buildable like this. It's got that water color texture, so that's what I use. I've linked it below in case you want to snag it. Then what I do is I use that same brush. If I hold down my smudge tool, it'll give me the same brush that I'm using for my smudge tool. Then I can go in and take some of these, it's way too big, take some of these details and just push them a little bit so it looks a little softer. There's a little bit of a blend to it and you don't have to go crazy with this part. You don't even have to do it if you don't want to, if it's not your style. But if I just do it here and there, it just adds a little extra. Of the more of a water media. Style, look. I could do it to the whole thing but that would be boring to watch. But if you decide to go that route, you can. But here's where I really like working in these layers. So I'm going to go back to my water layer. I'm going to create a layer on top of that because this is where I can add details which I'm a big fan of texture. Those of you who follow and watch my other tutorials and classes know that I love me some texture. So with the layer on top of the color layer water, I'm going to create a clipping mask so that anything that I do to this top layer will only apply to the pigment or pixels of the beneath. Then I'm going to go to my grid set, you could use any texture brush or just a pretty blend brush. It could be one one the painting brushes or whatever. I'm going to use spray noise just to, I might use static, I'm going to see, to break up and add some additional tones and shades into the water so that it doesn't look like a flat color. Again, you could do this with a watercolor style brush or the acrylic or something, because those look really lovely. I just happen to love some texture. So I'm going to put that in here. You can see it's just really light. I chose a lighter color because I didn't want to go crazy. I'm actually also going to come later because then I can put some texture even lighter than that. I might try the static for this one. Yeah, so there's more of that bubbling white part. I'm going to go all the way white at the base of this waterfall to make it look more like a waterfall. But doing it with texture, because fun, I guess now I can go back to blue. I had lighter colors of it, darker colors of it. Basically, just to give it some more dimension. Now I'm going to do that to the next layer, which is my tree layer. So create a clipping mask on top of that, grab that green color and then I'll probably go later and see how that looks. It brightens things up a bit. The last time that I did this, I actually ended up going darker, which made things look a little moodier. But it was for the Pacific Northwest. So it made sense. But this one, I just want to put some dimension and these trees are so tiny. I don't need to go crazy, and then these mountain ranges clipping mask. I'm going to make it more of a light gray color. That's too light, that looks like snow. So grab this again. Maybe I'll go a little bit darker; darker is better. So basically just play with this until you're happy with adding dimensions. So it might just be again, like a nice artist brush. It might be a texture brush. If these brushes interest you, there are whole bunch of different varieties of grid. I have linked everything that I'm using below so that you have quick reference to it. But otherwise, just apply clipping masks so that you can work indestructibly. If you don't have the amount of layers for that, you can always just go to your layer that you want to apply this technique to and just two finger swipe and Alpha lock it and then you can draw directly on it. The only difference is, with a clipping mask, I can turn that off and on, whereas I couldn't do that if I Alpha locked it. I like working destructively even when I know it doesn't matter. I've just gotten in the habit of it because back in the day I was really bad about doing that. I taught myself a valuable lesson. I've got my base layer selected. There's nothing on it right now. I just titled base color. It's below all of the layers that are active. The rest are just like my map layer and my guides which I'm not using. The base color, very bottom, and now I'm going to select a color that hopefully will not be clashing with everything else. But that's the reason why I like to do this last because that way I can really tell. I'm also not going to put a lot of thought into the brush that I use because I'm going to be chipping away at it. It's basically going to be applied and then removed. I'm just going to do a general circle around this here. This is too dark, but I wanted to apply a lot of texture and different colors. This color might just be like a secondary color. I'm going to play with that and see what I can get out of this. The next color, that seems like it might be too light, but we'll see. I'm going to use texture now, so charcoal's a really good one. It comes with Procreate. If you don't have like another set of texture brushes. For example, that burnt tree, don't like that color at all, if I apply a texture to it, it looks really nice. Don't think that you have to have like some crazy fancy texture pack to do this. They are available. I love them; I'm obsessed with them. If you have Procreate, you probably are familiar with spending too much on those brushes, but this is another route because that's a great brush. This is too yellow, so I'm actually going to go just into my hue saturation, brightness, and actually take the saturation down and then maybe cool that down, cool it up? That seems a lot better. I can go a little bit brighter than that actually. I play with that until I'm happy with a base color. I might end up like going into the library color tool and just playing around and seeing what this is going to look like as I hover over these other areas. But I feel like this range is about what I'm looking for. I might play with hue and go stick with this range. That seems better. You might be like this as a hot mess and yeah, it is. Now I'm going to go to my eraser tool and I'm going to find a brush that is really rough. There's textures in Procreate. I haven't used this, rectangle. That would be a good one. If you turn it way down. Basically what I do is I sit there and chip away at the edges and I go over it a few times. This pressure is actually perfect for it. It's going to allow me to make sure that there are no hard edges and the pressure sensitivity is great because I can really take away the outside edges while adding some transparency just inside of that so that it's more of a smooth transition. But it also looks cool to have a hard transition like this on the edges. That's really up to you how you want to do it. Sometimes I'll just do the edges first and then come in a little bit lighter. See what I can do there. I'm actually going to get rid of all of this because it's not part of the land that I want to focus on. You might also notice that my roads got a little bit lost when I added that background color. It's up to you. I like to emphasize, I'm a little bit more so I'll end up going over them with white. They're going under them, I guess I would say with white. Basically, that's what I do there. Then I add any extra texture I might want in there. Because I love the texture, I'm going to go in and put a layer on top of that and just grab like a darker version of that green. Seems good. Then go back to my grit set. There we go and grab just like a dense splatter and just add some gray in there. Not everywhere, but just a few places. Then another thing I like to do is grab the color of the map itself and bring out, that's a little too much, bring out some of that spray just like a little bit off of the canvas so that it looks more imperfect and you just think it adds so much play to it. This is TPL splatter, this is dense splatter, so you can see what that looks like. I am happy with this. I like the way that it looks. Actually, I see that, but I'm going to lighten this just by decreasing the opacity a little bit. Then I think I might even make it more saturated. I'm on the wrong layer, right? Yeah, wrong layer. This one, I did do that and then I want to increase the saturation smidge. You'll play with color and you will understand. I'm just going to go to white and then I'm going to go to my mono brush because it's going to be in-between these lines. I don't need it to be like perfect. I just want to make them pop a little bit more so that you can see that they're there and not just like random lines and they serve a purpose. When it's smaller, you just sees the difference. It's subtle, but it's something. 9. Next Steps: Thank you so much for drawing along with me in Procreate, everybody. This was so much fun and I hope you had a great time as well. I would love to see what you created, so be sure to share it in the projects and also check out others' maps as well. It's so fun to see the direction that each individual person chooses to take with this type of project and how everyone produces such different and interesting results. Also, be sure to follow me so you don't miss out on more classes. I am pumping them out all the time. Lastly, and probably the most exciting is that I offer freebies, including Procreate brushes, downloads, color palettes, and so much more every single week. Be sure to head over to thepigeonletters.com/freebies to get your hands on some awesome goodies. Thanks again. I will see you guys next time. 10. Trailer: Repeat Patterns on Procreate: Hey guys. My name's Peggy Dean. I'm an author and illustrator, and I'm very excited to bring a class to you all about how to create a repeat pattern on your iPad using only one app, Procreate. Repeat patterns are such a fun way to explore different types of designs, things you may probably have never even thought of creating. I'll tell you the most exciting part is that you do not have to be an artist to create some really adorable repeat patterns. We will be starting at the very beginning on how to begin drawing your elements that you want placed in your patterns. We're going go over utilizing multiple brushes, adding texture to your illustrations, working in scale, creating custom color palettes with limited selections so that you can really explore color harmonies, then we will move into actually building the composition to create your pattern, filling in the gaps, and then making sure that it's seamless. As a bonus, we are going to be putting our patterns on 3D mockup so that you can see them in action. This class is for you if you have an iPad and you want to create a pattern. It can be for those who have never ever created a pattern on Adobe software or any other type of software. This class is also for those of you who have been creating patterns for years, have your own fabric lines, what have you, and you just got an iPad and you want to explore the amazing tools that are right at your fingertips so you can really take your workflow to the next level. I'm going to walk you through my entire workflow from beginning to end. At the end of this class, your project will be to use these tools to create your very own pattern using just the iPad. I'm very excited to dive into this with you guys. Let's get designing. 11. Trailer: Watercolor Map Keepsakes: Hey guys. My name is Peggy Dean, and I am an artist and educator. In this class, we're just going to be playing with a very fun illustrative style by incorporating some quirky nature to illustrated maps and we're going to be doing it with watercolor, which is a really fun technique to create some beautiful washes along with that illustration style. To create these maps, they're going to be anywhere that means something to you. This can be a vacation that you took and landmarks that you want to remember. It can be your home town. It can be a state park, just something that makes you feel really happy. So we're going to capture that together and I'm going to walk you through every step that you need to make that happen. This class is for you if you just want to have a memorable keepsake and go along the process of creating something that's unique to you. I'm really excited to jump in. Let's get started.