Inky Maps! Illustrate a Beautiful Map Using Digital and Analog Media

1. Class Trailer: Hi, my name is Tom Froese. I'm an illustrator and designer in Vancouver, British Colombia. I'm also the teacher of the popular Skillshare class, Inky illustrations, where I show you how to combine digital and analog media to create beautiful and sophisticated illustrations. One of my favorite kinds of projects is the Illustrated map. Now, people love maps because they of course, guide us through space, they show us how to get from one place to another, they give us a picture of the places we call home. Illustrated maps are great because they go beyond just the functional utilitarian map and actually tell a story about that place. Instead of guiding us through physical space, they guide us through an emotional experience. In this class, we're going to create maps of our own hometowns or favorite cities and learn how to apply some of the illustration techniques that I teach in inky key illustrations and bring them to the next level to make more sophisticated and complex illustrations. We're going right from the beginning from planning and brainstorming our maps to sketching them out, to actually making the map, so I'm really excited to get into this class. Now, I pulled my Instagram audience, what my next Skillshare class would be, and one of the most popular requests actually was how to make an Illustrated map. I just want to thank, and I hope you get your names right here, @Egadthatssara, @Sblumenthal, and @Pflanzen.essen. Those are your Instagram handles, forgive me if I totally butchered them, but thank you so much for the suggestion. You really motivated me to get this class together and now I'm super excited to see what you guys make. Are you ready to make your inky maps? Great, so am I. Let's do this. 2. The Project: For the class project, you get to illustrate your own map of your hometown or the favorite city. Your map can be about anything you want. It can focus on a small area of the city, such as a neighborhood or communities, or it can feature of the whole city. Your map could be about places that mean the most to you or that were important to you at a certain period of your life, or maybe your childhood paper route, or maybe just your favorite restaurants. Your map should include 5-10 small illustrations that call out these significant places. In addition to these, it should have the usual map things like land, water, and other geographical features, and of course roads. Your map should also have a title. Whatever is important in the map should be labeled. Label your street names, there's parks or anything else like beaches, looking at the map that make sense of it, lake names, river names, those kinds of things. Of course, don't forget the compass rose, the little north pointing arrow that tells people which way is up. The deliverables throughout this class will be to share some of your sketches, share some of your in-progress illustration, and then, of course, your final Illustrated map for everyone to appreciate. I really encourage you to share your progress along the way so that the rest of the class and give you feedback. Of course, I can give you feedback. During this class, you're going to pick up some really great illustration skills, including brainstorming and planning, you can concept development, sketching, and of course, combining analog and digital illustration techniques, Photoshop. Everybody loves illustrated maps and I know your maps are just going to be super awesome. I'm really excited to see what you guys do. Follow along and I'll do my best to guide you through all the steps necessary to make something awesome. 3. Required Skills and Equipment: In order to successfully complete this class, you're going to need a few basic things. First, you're going to need a computer equipped with Photoshop CC or some more recent version of Photoshop. Using a stripped back version of Photoshop, like Photoshop Elements won't work for this class because they don't have layers and the Pen tool particularly which we will make a lot of use of in this class. You should have some comfort working in Photoshop. If you're new to Photoshop, it will be more challenging, so I recommend taking my earlier skill share class in key illustrations where I really go into depth in some of the basics that we'll use in this class. My job is to guide you through all the steps necessary to create a beautiful Illustrated map. In terms of supplies, you'll need some very basic things, white paper for sketching and a pencil of course, an eraser. You can also use a sketchbook if you prefer. I like to do sketches on crappy paper because it doesn't feel precious to me and I can do as many sketches as I want without getting worried about using up on my precious sketchbook paper. The reason you'd use sketchbook paper rather than Xerox paper is because it has a bit more of a texture to it, and so the subtleties of that can just be more interesting when you actually get into making your inking marks and scanning them in and using them in Photoshop. For making inking marks of course you're going to need black ink. Almost any brand of ink will do as long as it's black India ink. For fine lines and smaller details, I like to use a nib pen. This is a speed ball handle and 512b nib. If you have any nib, this is the nib to get, the 512b nib, and it comes to a nice point. You can use any paint brush you have on hand, I recommend using a round tapered paintbrush and size is anywhere from zero to one or two. Another great paintbrush to use is a flat chisel tipped brush. The nice thing about these is that you can do nice uniform thick strokes, which is great when you're doing roads and rivers in your map. To summarize for this class, you will need a computer with Photoshop, a scanner, a pencil, some paper, India ink, some brushes, and some nice sketchbook paper to make your inking marks on. If you have these things, you're going to be able to do the whole project. Well, let's go. 4. The 5 Elements of Illustrated Maps: Before we really get into illustrating our maps, I think it's a good idea to define what goes into an illustrated map. Now I've identified five key things that go into illustrated maps. The first is geography. Geography means basically land and where it meets the water and that's going to give you the defining shape of the town or city. If it were a whole country, it would be pretty simple you'd just draw the shape of the country with a town it's more like you crop into where the town is and then you get whatever rivers cutting through or coastline or lakes or ponds. If there's no water features in your particular town or city or part of it, then you can of course use anything that defines the land, mountains, parks, forests, etc. The second key element is roads. Roads of course, show you how to get between the different significant places in your map and they also create some order and structure to the space and give you actual coordinates on which to place other elements. You don't have to just have roads. You could have public transit, railroads, bike paths, etc. The third key element in illustrated maps are icons. Icons are of course, the pictures that depict significant places in the map. In our case, we're doing five icons and these are our primary icons. You can also do secondary icons that fill in the space and add visual interest to your map and those can be trees and bridges and signs and maybe lamp posts and little cyclists. These things can repeat as you need to through out the map and they really just help support the primary illustrations. The fourth key element in an Illustrated map of course, is labels and thank God for this because labels are really what make a map dynamic and like able in my opinion. Of course, people like the illustration parts but it's the labels that say this is this thing and this is that thing and I think lettering is just a really nice little detail. So label your streets, label your water, your rivers, your parks, even label your icons or especially label your icons and this is going to be a fun lettering exercise, thinking of different lettering styles for the different kinds of things throughout the map. Lastly, the fifth key element in an Illustrated map, is the compass rose. The compass rose is the little North pointing arrow that shows you which way is up in a map. You could be as simple as just like a little arrow and an N, or you can be more elaborate and have a full compass rose with the North, South, East, West. If you want, you can customize, like instead of traditional compass rose you could use a pointing fingers or an airplane or a bird flying North, maybe something that ties in with the theme of your map. Those are the five key elements and they're really going to act as our checklist moving forward for how we included everything we need to include in our maps. 5. Brainstorming: o before actually starting our maps, the first thing we want to do is do some brainstorming. Brainstorming is where we're going to come up with our concept for a map and then think about what's included in our map. So we're going to pick a city or a town, and then we're going to pick some points of interests within that town to create as our icons. So for brainstorming, all you really need is some paper and a pencil. I'm going to start off just listing some cities that I think I might want to illustrate my map for. So of course my hometown, will be one of them and maybe some of my favorite cities like New York, Paris, Seattle, of course where I live now, Vancouver. I could do my hometown and that would be a really interesting challenge because it's obscure, not a lot of people have heard of new market, and in my own opinion, it's not actually a very interesting place to depict. So the challenge would be, what can I find that's interesting about my hometown and make it look really interesting for people? So that is a really great creative challenge. Other possibilities would just be to make, like if you're really just interested in doing a beautiful map, it might be easier to do a big city with iconic points of interest like New York with the Statue of Liberty, and the Empire State Building, or Paris with the Eiffel Tower. There's another town I hadn't thought about, which is where I lived in my twenties, which was in Toronto. I think Toronto will work for my map. Now I've picked my town. What about Toronto? Do I want to depict? Maybe it's all the touristy sites. Or maybe it's about my personal experience when I lived there. So I lived there in my 20s. There may be certain places that I frequented or that were important to me at that time. Yeah, I think that, that might be for me a really great story to tell, is Toronto in my 20s. I like how that even sounds. So if you just call it Toronto In My Twenties, just as a working title for now. Now that I've focused in on very specific aspect and experience about Toronto, I can actually start thinking of points of interest that I can illustrate as my icons. So maybe just to get a sense of the place I'll do the cliche, and for Toronto it's the CN Tower. That's the thing you think about when you think of Toronto. Then maybe it's where I met, I met my wife in Toronto. So I met her at St. Andrew's church. I had a favorite coffee bar, that was Dark Horse, spent a lot of time journaling there. So that's 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. That's eight things to illustrate. I think the next thing we want to think about once you pick your points of interest or your icons, or your icons to illustrate, the next thing you want to do is maybe, just think up off the top of your head what you might want to depict in terms of your illustration. What symbol do you want to use? So for CN Tower, obviously it's the tower itself. For St. Andrew's church, it's the church building. Probably just from the front. Dark Horse, Espresso Bar, it could be the logo, it could be some kind of coffee or espresso, could be the building facade. Are we thinking in terms of what makes a good symbol and what's also visually interesting to look at. So that's really the brainstorming process. It's really just coming up with the idea of your map, what story you're trying to tell, and then thinking of some points of interest in the map that you want to include. So I encourage you to really pick a place that interests you and go with your gut. Think about just what gets you excited. What do you really want to illustrate? What do you want to spend all this time doing? With our concept established, we can now move into gathering visual references. 6. Gathering Visual References: With your brainstorm now done, you have a concept for your map, and you've pick the city and you know what you want to include in your map. Now it's just time to start finding reference images that you can use. When you're sketching these things out. You're going to need three basic kinds of images to reference. Images of the map itself, what does look like from a map perspective? We'll go into Google Maps for that, and then you're going to need some images of the specific icons you're going to use to tell your story, and then of course, you'll just need some general images of the city just to get a sense of the feeling of the city, of the flavor of the city, and to hopefully pick out some things that you can use as secondary elements to really make your map about the city. Whether the street signs look like, maybe there's some particular iconic things, about the city that you can include in a smaller way that thing. Now, starting out on a project, I like to be organized, and this just really helps me keep track of all the different visual references that I'm pulling and they don't just all end up in a random folder on my hard drive, what I do is I have a root folder, which is for my entire project, you can make one called Inky Maps for instance and within this, you create a sub folder called References, and then within that folder you create sub folders for each different reference material. We'll have a Map folder and Icons folder and a General City folder. Then that way when you start collecting these images, you'll know where to find them. When you're looking for images. Look for images that clearly depict the thing you want to illustrate. Let's just say you want to illustrate a building. Let's just say it's the Statue of Liberty, look for an image of the Statue of Liberty that shows it the most clearly in the most iconic way, probably better to find an image that's straight on from a distance than to have a picture that was taken from Lady Liberty's feet looking up and she's in this crazy weird perspective. At this point, you can also be deciding whether you think you will want to illustrate things from a straight on perspective or from more of a three-quarter. Straight on would be everything is flat and you're just doing the front of a building, for instance, three-quarter view would be you're doing maybe from across the corner of the street and you see the edge of the building and then the two sides. I like to have most of my illustrations fall into one or the other. But sometimes it's actually nice to have a little bit of a mix. But when you're looking up your visual references, keep, viewing angle in mind, and of course, the clarity of the image itself. When you're trying to find out what the map itself will look like. Your best friend is Google Maps, you'll need a Google account and be logged into Google for this. Then you just go into maps.google.com, and look up your city and start creating a custom map, and I'll show you how to do this. I just go right to Google Maps, open that up. Now, you could just punch city in and get them out for you in general like that, but what I find most helpful is actually plot out the things on my map in Google Maps. What I do is I just go to this little Hamburger menu here and go down to Your Places, and you have to be logged into Google for this. I'm assuming you have a Google account and you're logged in, you go to Your Places, and then you just go over the Maps and right at the bottom is this tiny little thing here it says Create Map. You click that, and you start making a map, this is going to be your literal reference for your map, and so it's good to just give it a title and I'll just call it Toronto in my 20's, add a description if you want and so now I'm just going to go in to my city here. Once you are in your city, start searching one by one, your primary points of interests. So CN Tower is mine, it drops at pin for you and then gives you the option to add it to map in this little pop-up box here. Then it just ends up there in the side, I'm going to do this for all of my points so St. Andrews, once you have all the points in your map plotted out here, you want to just make sure you're looking at a view that has everything in the same window and this essentially will be the basis of how you draw your map. Once you have this view, just do a screen grab of it. What I like to do is just go make the window go as full screen as possible and then get it cropped in. Just so that everything, I want to include in map, it's tightly within the edges, if you're on a Mac to capture a portion of your screen, you would hit "Command Shift 4", and then you get a little closer then you can just a draw a rectangle around all of the points in your map, keeping in mind the eight by ten dimensions or aspect ratio of your final illustration, and just snap that. That image will end up on our desktop, and we can just throw it in to our map reference folder. Now you've collected all your visual references. The next thing you're going to do is start sketching from these images, and I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson. 7. Sketching the Base Map: Now it's time to start sketching our maps. That will include three basic stages. The first will be sketching the base map, so that's the land, the water, and the roads. The second will be sketching the individual points of interest or icons. Then the third will be bringing those altogether in the Photoshop file and adding some finishing touches. The very first thing that I need to do then is go to my screen grabs of the maps that I did in the last stage and find a screen grab that I think will work well for basing my entire map on. This looks good to me. I'm just going to open it in Photoshop. Now I'm going to create a new file. This will be my sketch file. We're going to make this dimensions our final dimensions of the illustration, which is going to be eight or 10 inches wide by eight inches high. We'll set the resolution to 300. For now, let's just work in grayscale. Lets take color out of the equation. We'll set the color mode to grayscale. You can leave everything else as is and press Okay. First thing we should do is probably just save the file and give it a name. You can name yours whatever you want. Now I'm going over to the screenshot. I'm going to copy the whole thing, and then you go over to your sketch file and then you paste. Now pasted the map in black and white, which is exactly what we want because the file is black and white. Let's now stretch this base map into the full size of the canvas. To do this, we can just bring the map up here to the top corner, and if you hit Command T, you get the transform tool activated. What you can do is just hold Shift and stretch it out until all the white, the background color is gone. Double-click somewhere on the image and then use the mouse to drag the map into frame. I just want to make sure I have no map pins going outside of the bounds of the canvas. Interestingly, I have a concentration of these points along this narrow band through the middle of the map, and then all this space up and down. There's different ways I can approach this. I can stretch this so that I fudge the proportions of the land. Remember, we're not trying to be realistic here, we're trying to tell a story. As long as a place resembles Toronto in terms of the icons we're using and some of the shoreline in this case, that's all we need. While this would be a complete full part to stretch something like this, if it were a logo or a typeface. This is just that we're just using this as a reference for our sketch. Now one issue I have here is that now I've done this, and the roads are all skewed and Toronto's roads are not skewed like that. It's a perpendicular grid. What I would want to do is correct that and make the grid perpendicular like that. If you're wondering how I did that, I'm just going to undo this and I'll show you how I did that. What I wanted to do was make this narrow band of points on my map start filling the whole space. The first thing I do is I press Command T for the transform tool, and then I stretch by pressing or by just pulling the control points up and down until everything fills the space the way I want it to. I'm just going to zoom out a bit here. Then to commit that change, I can double-click. Then now that I want to change the road so that they're perpendicular again, I'm going to hit Command T for transform again. I'm going to grab this control point, but right now this control point doesn't do anything except squeeze the image horizontally. What I want to do is make it skew the image diagonally. I hit Command while pulling this control point and then I get the diagonal skewing. I can do it again on this side, I put my mouse over the control point and then I hit Command and skew image. I'm just going to just keep doing this until Toronto's, the shape I need it to be to make my map. Now I think my roads are perpendicular, but everything that seems to be still on this diagonal. This is a simple rotate. With your transform command still activated, if you move your pointer outside of the bounds of the box, you get this little curvy arrow, and that means rotate. You can now use the mouse to rotate the piece of image here. I'm going to commit this, and just make sure I have all eight of my points in view. I cannot still correct this for straightness a little bit here. Here I have the beach, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Everything's in there. Great. It looks, like a mess right now, but once we apply our own illustration to this basic framework, it will be magic. Now you might be wondering right now, how is this a sketch? We're looking at a computer screen and we're not even holding a pencil. Well, here's a dirty little secret. Let's just all agree here that very few of us, if any, are real map makers, which means nobody is holding us to any standards of original map artistry here. I mean, as per me stretching and skewing this map horrifically. You have two options. You can sketch this map just looking at the screen and do it by eye on paper or, what I like to do is, print the map like this as it is, as you see it here. Then just trace over it filling in only the streets that I think I need. Then that just saves me a lot of time in trying to like eyeball, especially when it's a complex city with lots of streets and weird intersections. I'm not suggesting that you just directly trace over a map and make no changes or use no imagination, but it's just a starting point and it gets us over what could be just very intimidating if you're looking at, how am I going to draw this crazy grid of streets and crazy shoreline or whatever it is? If you're going to print your map, let's just do a few adjustments to it before we print it for maximum contrast. Because right now, the map it's not very contrasty. It's not going to print well. The first thing you do is just make sure your layers panel is open. If its not, just go to Window and then find layers in the list and select that. We're going to go down to the bottom of the layers panel to this middle round circle button at the bottom. This creates a new filler adjustment layer. We're just going to click that and then select levels. We're going to do a little levels adjustment and just darken the darks a bit here just to get a nice balance of light and dark. Now granted your lake or in my case, the lake is going to have a lot of black and I don't really need that to print. That would be a little bit of a waste of ink. There's different ways you can go about it. I might just quickly use my eraser tool, I'm going to select the actual layer one here, the image, and just delete out some of the lake here. This is totally optional. I'm just saving a bit of toner by doing this. Now I'm going to print it. When you print, just make sure that your layout is set to landscape and because it's eight by 10, it's probably going to fit at a 100 percent on your printer paper. But just to be sure, you can just select scale to fit media and it will make sure that the entire image of your map gets printed. We're just going to print that. The next thing we're going to do is trace this on a light table. We have our printed map based on the light table here. Now, not everyone is going to have a giant like table like this, but that's okay. You can actually get smaller portable light tables. In a pinch, you can also just tape this on a window against daylight and then trace over that. That way. I'm just going to get a piece of tape here, and tape my piece of paper over top that I'm going to sketch on. Now, I'm just going to probably start with the shoreline. The goal here is not to get a totally accurate depiction of the city's geography here. It's really just to get a familiar enough image of the city. I need to be very careful here because I erased some of this water here, but now it's starting to look like actual shoreline. I just want to make sure that I'm tracing the real shoreline, and not just my erased bits here and piece of land there. There I have my land, my water, and just to make sure I am not confusing one for the other, I'll just fill in a few waves. Everything is water. The next thing I'm going to do is just put a dot wherever there is a point of interest and they should be eight. So I'll just make sure I had them 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 and at this point, it's probably just a good idea to go on and label them. So we'll just turn off the light table here and you can get a sense now at the page and how the map is turning out. Here are the bounds of the map, roughly speaking. You have your water, your land, and you can really just get a sense of where the different points of interests fall on the map. I'd say that's a nice distribution. Now we can start filling in some of the major routes. Starting to fill in the roots really starts to break up the space nicely. I like how this railroad just cuts through the city along the whole thing. Kind of leads your eye through the maps. I'm going to do that, depict the railroad and the sort of traditional street are the traditional line with the hash marks intersecting along the way. Of course, the main street for my story is this street here called Queen Street. I'm just going to label it as I go along. You can label them later if you want but this will help me keep track of which is which. Roads in your illustrated map don't actually have to terminate or start where they do in real life. It's really just about setting up enough of a grid to locate where things are. When you're labeling your streets, especially the ones going vertically, make sure the labels all kind of orient in the same direction. So I'm always writing with the baseline down here and this is up, this is down. Just filling in some of the more important roads. By important, I mean mostly significant to my own story, but also to establishing a sense of place for someone familiar with Toronto. They can at least see one or two roads that they know very well as part of the map and that just helps set of essence of place. Major roads will be thicker in your illustration and then more minor roads can just be simple lines. I'm really brutalizing these roads in terms of being accurate and I'm totally fine with that. The more brutal the better in terms of being a bit wonky and whimsical. Especially since we're working directly over top of map. Anything you can do to make it more original and more something that you made rather than something that the Internet gave you, I think the better. I'm just going to turn off my light table again just to get a sense of how the roads are shaping up. I have a nice concentration of roads here. I might be able to use just a few more roads out in this direction and maybe a few labels to fill in. So I'll do some more labels. Some of the islands here and this part of town. Now is probably a good time to just fill in some parts where parks are and in my map anyway I'm not featuring any of these parks particularly. So it's really just like I might just fill it in with a Green color or something that indicate that it's a Park just to make them more visually interesting. But we really want to focus on the icons of the story or the icons from our concepts so that the points of interest, those are the things you really want to call out. Name some of the waterways. Having a nice variety of thicker roads and thin roads will also add some added dynamic quality to the base map. There is supposed to be a river where this highway is, a dying river, unfortunately, I'll draw it beside it. Now I am definitely taking liberties with where this river is and how it connects to the lake there and I'm okay with that. It's more whimsical that way. This is my base map, my roads, some land and water, and just enough roads to show you where things are. Nothing is final at this stage, this is my first rough sketch. I'm now going to scan this into photoshop. From there, I'm just going to start sketching individually each point of interest, and then scanning each one of those in a separate illustrations. I'm going to lay them out over top this in my Photoshop file and that way I can move them around and get them oriented just the way I want them without having to mess up this base map here. This can stay as it is and I can make a composite sketch by just bringing in these types sketches, like that. Using your scanner and scanning software, scan in your basemap sketch. Scanning in your sketch, you only need to scan it at 300. As you remember, our sketch files only 300 dpi anyway and we traced this at a 100 percent, so it will be the right size. You can just make sure that you scan that to a folder that makes sense for your project. You just need to scan it in black and white. Just open that up and we're going to rotate this. I like to clean things up just so it looks a little crisper when I'm working with it. What I'm doing here is just darkening the darks and whitening the whites. Then you get a much cleaner sketch. I'll show you how I did that, I'm going to cancel out and I'll show you again. I press "Command L" to bring up the Levels adjustment tool or you can just go "image", "adjustments", "levels" and just pull that black TAB until the dark start looking nice and dark, usually about where this little histogram starts. The same thing from the right side so that white label and pull it toward the center. Usually once you're past the really big, tall bump in the histogram, that's when most of the noise is gone. Make your blacks blacker and your whites whiter, and then hit "OK". Now you have a nice clear sketch. Now we're back in our actual sketch file and as you remember, we pasted our Google Maps screen grabbing here, adjusted it a bit and then printed it. So this is a layer we probably don't need anymore, but we may need it later if we ever need to reprint in retraces. Why don't we just keep these layers by doing the following. This is the Levels Adjustment layer and this is the actual map screen grab layer. I'm just going to hold "Shift" down and press down on both those layers to group them or to select both of them and then I'm going to put them in their own little group by hitting this little folder icon. When I do that, it creates a new group and I'm just going to rename that to Google Maps and disable the layer visibility. I'll just turn that layer off, that layer group off basically. Let's go back to our basemap scan that we cleaned up nicely. Let's go "Command A" to select all, and then "Command C" to copy. Then we're going go over back to our sketch file and just paste that in by hitting "Command V". Let's rename this layer as "Base map sketch" for now, and save the file. The next thing we're going to want to do is sketch and scan in our icons. 8. Sketching the Icons: Now we've finished sketching our base map, and it's time to return to our pencil and paper and scan the individual points of interest or icons. You might be sitting in front of a computer and looking at your reference images on-screen. I have them on my iPad here. It's conveniently sitting to the side and I can reference them that way. That's what I'll be doing. The goal for our map icons is to be simple and iconic, so get the likeness of the thing you're depicting, the point of interest, whether it's a building, or food or a sign. Other than that, just keep it simple. The simpler these are, the more whimsical they'll be, more iconic they'll be and your map will be clearer for that. I'm drawing the lifeguard station here, its hipped roof. There's a little sign here, maybe too small. I'm going to try and include the lettering here. When I'm sketching in my lettering, I don't need to take too much time to get the lettering right because that's something I'll do at the illustration stage. I'm trying to add only the amount of detail I need to get the likeness of the object, other than getting it all super detailed. If you remember from my inky illustrations class, the essence of an inky illustration, is having a nice bold shape that's color and then some details or textures made out of ink. I'll probably go in and make the textures of the roof here using ink and maybe do some of these other details, but these bigger sheets I'll make using the pen tool. We're just keeping that in mind. I could be adding more detail to this, like the lake and the distance of sailboats, but then we're starting to get into a whole illustration onto itself. These are really just simple depictions. Some icons can be more detailed than others of course, just have a bit of variety. We all reference images that we find on Google. This is just a word about making sure you're not plagiarizing other people's creative work. Technically, if you use a photo, even if you reference the photo for an illustration, you're supposed to credit the creator of that image and even get their permission. But if I did that for every image that I reference for my illustration, there'll be a lot of people to thank. I have a rule of thumb when it comes to making sure I'm not plagiarizing and that's basically, if it's a unique image that only that photographer could have taken and it's very recognizable, then I can't use it. But if it's more general, generic view of something, then it's more like I'm not really copying their photo, they just happen to take a photo of the thing that I'm illustrating. Just for instance, here we have this image of this quintessential, very characteristic street sign from Little Italy. The photographer took this. If I already used this photo in a magazine, I would have to credit them and get their permission and possibly you're going to have to pay them a fee. But me drawing this sign from this image does not, in my opinion, constitute plagiarism because there's no way that this generic image of a sign as I'm drawing it, that can be traced back to any particular photographer. That's the rule of thumb that I have for myself. If you're the photographer of the sign and you are watching me make this, then I suppose you have proof. Just fill your pages up. Then you have one page bolstered on another. Don't be afraid to be a little bit wonky. That's what makes things interesting. A tree here. When I draw a tree is I usually do a trunk, some branches and then a blob for the tree top. Maybe I'll add in some texture later, especially for these icons you don't need to go in and illustrate every individual leaf. We want to have as few beady parts as you can and stick to more bold, bigger general shapes. Next on the list is Kensington Market. Kensington Market, I couldn't find any single thing that represents this very eclectic neighborhood in Toronto. But one thing that definitely is characteristic of the experiences, when you're there, there's a lot of these old Victorian era, row homes and they're painted bright colors and the bottom floors have these shops in them. A lot of them are vintage shops. I'm going to try depicting this very simply with some generic vintage shops or restaurants down at the bottom, and see how that goes. Again, remembering how I've done all my other illustrations, keeping them pretty simple and stylized. It may take you a few tries before you're satisfied at even how simple your images look. Maybe you've drawn it too detailed and you have to go back and strip it back a bit. I'm referencing this image and I'm making up some of the details on it being more general. Because the icon is not about these particular stores, but about the experience of shops and this particular kind of architecture. Instead of giving a specific name, I'll call it vintage shop. Then maybe this one is a little cafe and a marquee, why not? Big umbrella, what I'm doing here is putting some large things in front of what would otherwise be very detailed things. Instead of showing all the little coat racks and such in the vintage shop and all the patrons sitting in the patio, or even trying to figure out what that all looks like, I'll pick a few large things that I can put in the way, and it relieves me of the burden of having to illustrate and think up all those other things. It's a little trick that I use sometimes, and I'll put a bike here. This might end up being one of my more detailed illustrations or icons, and I can just make this one a little bit bigger. If I do any more detail to this, it will look too busy. Might have to pair that back anyway. Street sign and if there's something in the image, your reference image that you can't quite make out, it's too blurry, don't worry about it. Just make it whatever it looks like. In this case it's something weird, I don't know what those are. I'm not going to worry about it. It's just a detail and these are meant be Icons anyway. Now I have my sketches of my points of interest, and I'm going to scan these in and put them in the same file as my base map sketch, and start putting them in place. 9. Combining Map and Icon Sketches: Now that we've sketched our icons, we can scan them in and place them exactly where we want in our map sketch. I have scanned my icon sketches and I've opened them up in Photoshop, and I'm going to copy and paste each one of these into my base map sketch. I'm going to paste them over top this and then start arranging them here. Of course, what I like to do is clean up the sketch a bit using the levels adjustment tool, then just use the lasso tool to create a selection around this. I'm just going to copy that and paste it in my map. I'll give that a name. This one's Kensington. I'm also going to create a smart object out of that. The reason I create smart objects out of my layers is because it enables me to move around, size up and scale down as many times as I want without losing any image quality. If I were to do all those operations just on a layer here without turning it into a smart object. If I made this really small and they made a really big again, it's going to get all blurry. As soon as I made it really small, its scaled everything down and I lost a whole bunch of information and resolution. That's why I make these into smart objects, no matter how big or how small I make it and how many times I do this it stays nice and crisp and high resolution. I've named it, I've turned it into a smart object, and now I'm just going to place it in the general direction, in the general size that I think I might want it and leave it at that for now. Just going to go and do that. Every icon sketch that I have, I'm going to turn that into a smart object and then place it roughly where I think I want it. The closer you crop when your lassoing your sketches, easier it'll be to work with and you bring them over into your sketch file. Lets copy and paste, create into a smart object. I have all eight icon sketches overlaid on top of my base map sketch. Once you have all your icon sketches as separate smart objects over top your base map, you can start playing around with them until they're in the right position and sizes that you want. While you're working, if it helps you see things a little better, you can go to your base map sketch and just take down the opacity a little bit, so you can see are icons look a little better. You can really see how they are being distributed in the canvas. I have a few different options in terms of how I arrange things here. Right now they're more or less where they belong on the map, give or take. Things are pretty much beside the dots. In some cases though, there's little bit of overlap like the CN Tower and CN unders are very much in the same vertical space here, so I've just taken liberties to move the church here, the dot indicating the exact location of the church will stay where it is and I can just put the icon to either side. Another thing that I could do is, if I wanted to make this icon bigger and really celebrate what these look a like. There's no reason why I couldn't just put them somewhere else and then draw a line in the final illustration leading to where they belong. In that way, you get to have your base map proportional and the dots indicating where things are in the streets can show people where they are on the street, then your icons get to be nice and big and people can enjoy those and appreciate those at a bigger size as well. The only thing you have to do of course, is draw the lines leading to them and making sure that everything is labeled correctly. As I'm moving things around, I'm also remembering that I do need some room to have a map title and possibly a compass rose as well. Once we've done this, we can move into some actual illustration. Once we've illustrated our base map and our individual icons, then we can move on to adding some finishing touches to make your map a little bit more exciting. 10. A Word on Color: Hold on, I think we're forgetting one really important thing before we get into our illustration, and that's color. More than anything else, color is what's going to make your illustration amazing. For our project, I'd like you to stick to not more than five colors, anymore than that, the project actually becomes a little bit more complicated and the actual map itself, it's harder to get that to look really good doing lots of colors, starts to look busy, and you're starting to have to think about what colors are working with what? How do you start building a color palette? Well, you can come up with your own colors from heart by heart or from your head if you're confident in doing that. If you're like me, sometimes you get a little bit stuck at this stage and need a starting point. For this particular project we're doing, our cities or towns, which means we can go to the flags for cities or the seals looking that up and just using that as our starting point. One thing I like to do, especially with maps, is to look at vintage maps and just see how color was used on that, because in a typical vintage map the amount of colors was very limited. The printing techniques they used were really interesting like overprint, like just printing one color over top the other. Why don't we take a look at some of my own vintage maps and just we'll go through how vintage maps use color. We'll also be looking at more contemporary maps just to see how simple colors are used in a more modern sense. Here's an old map of Barcelona, and it's actually just printed using orange and black. You can see in this example that they have used sort of a 50 percent black for the water and then pure black for the roads. Very simple composition, not a lot of detail. They've used a nice punch of orange with black for their points of interest. This is a map of Brussels, and here they have like a super simple map, almost too simple. It's just green and black and they've used white outlines for the roads. What I find more impressive in this particular map guide is how they've used two colors on the cover. They have this sort of deep teal green color here, and nice saturated, pure red, and when they combine together they can create a nice black. So when the green is printed over the red, you get this virtual black. Wherever they cut out the ink, they knocked out the white of the paper through, it really stands out. This is a really great example of how two colors can work beautifully. In this map, the cover is made just using orange and black, and then a percentage of the orange. In this example here, four colors are used; so they have; green, black, blue, and the orange yellow here. They have blue for the water, green for the parks, a sort of 50 percent or 25, maybe even a five percent black here for the land, and then black and orange for the points of interest. Let's turn more to some contemporary examples. This is a map just using a metallic foil or a foil of copper, and then sort of copper green and dark, almost navy blue. In this case, the two colors have been overprinted to create a third color around the shorelines. Here they've used four colors. They just have this blue gray and a dark black, a burgundy, and a yellow. Here's another contemporary example where; yellow, black, and the red have been used in a very light percentage of the black use for the land, and then just knocked it out to the paper color for the roads. The icons themselves are just made one color. These are very graphic, factory looking well though, so a little bit different staff a lot of us will be doing. You could still visibly go straight here, icons, just a single color if you wanted to. Here is an example of just a hot pink and a black. It just creates this beautiful, very contrasts EPs. I just really love how the colors work here. This is an extreme complex map and extremely simple icons, but you can really see how two colors selected well, can be very stunning and attractive. You don't need a lot of colors to make your map look beautiful. 11. Setting Up the Illustration File: In this stage, we just set up our file and just make sure that all the layers are set up in a way that will really enable us to focus on illustrating while still being very organized on our layers. This is very important because if we're disorganized in our layers, and they're all over the place. Then later on we have a whole bunch of things that should be together at the same time, they get very hard to find. This is just a way of keeping everything together. Way back when we were gathering our visual references, we created an initial folder in our hard drive called Inky Maps that's all the files and folders for the project, and we created our references folder. Then when we started sketching and scanning things in there, we created the Sketches folder. Now let's create in our Inky Maps folder, a subfolder called Illustrations, and we can just make sure that that folder is in the Inky Maps folder. Now none of this is obligatory. This is just how I keep organized. Let's open our Sketch file, this is the file where we have all of our icons placed over top the Base Map Sketch. What we're going to do is just turn this Sketch file into our Illustration file and we're going to do that just by doing a save as command, and we'll go into that Illustrations folder we just made. We're going to just rename the file to Inky Maps Illustration or whatever you want to call it. Don't forget the PSD extension and save. Once we save it, were good to start taking the steps to making this our Illustration file. Let's go to change it from black and white or grayscale back to color and we're going to use RGB color. If it asks you whether you want to flatten or not, don't flatten it and don't rasterize. If you want to make sure that it's the right dimensions and the right resolution, you can just go to check the image size open the image menu. Make sure that it's 8 by 10 inches and a resolution of at least 300 pixels per inch, and then press OK. In the layers panel here you'll see all the Icon Sketches that we created as smart objects. I have 8 and then the Base Map Sketch, the Base Map Sketch was the map underneath and the Icon Sketches are all the icons that are over top of the Base Map. You may also still have the Google Map layer that was from when we sketch all these things, and we definitely don't need that. You can take your Google Map layer and just drag that to the trash can and I'll just turn all these layers back on so we can see them again. What you want to do is group all these icons into one layer group called Sketches. Select the top layer and then hold shift and select the Base Map Sketch layer everything but background basically. Then you can click this little folder here or press control G to make layer group. We'll just rename this to Sketches. One thing I'll do just because it will be convenient later on, is I'm going to select all the Icon Sketches themselves and make one sub group and I'll call those Icons Sketches. Now we have an Icon Sketches a Base Map Sketch and Sketches. This will be nice to have this on separate groups basically. We can turn off the Icon Sketches and see just the Base Map, which is actually what we want to start working on first. It's nice to create a Base Map independent of the Icon Sketches so that once we start illustrating our icons, we can move them around over the map beneath that we've created first. The next step will be to create a layer group in which your illustration will occur. Just create a new folder above Sketches and call it, I'm calling them folders, but they're actually technically called layer groups. If I say folder or layer group I'll mean the same thing if we're talking within the context of Photoshop. Let's rename this layer group to Art. The Art layer group will be where all of our illustration, it will exist. Another thing we'll do to this Art layer group is set the Blending Mode to multiply. The reason we do that is because as we create any art in this layer group, the Sketches will be visible through it. I didn't have the art layer group to set and multiply everything would be okay, so just set that to multiply and we'll be able to see our sketch. That sketch is actually coming through pretty darkly too, and it might be a little bit distracting once we start illustrating. Let's select the Sketches layer and just take the capacity down to 30 percent or so- 12. Starting the Base Map Illustration: At this stage now, we're going to just lay down the colors in basic shapes over this map. In this lesson, I show you how I quickly come up with some colors for the map. You'll see how picking colors at this point matters, but it isn't really locked down at this point out of it, so go ahead, pick some colors, play around with them. But you can be sure that as we go along, we will make some adjustments. For me, I think I'm going to try and use the colors of the city, like some colors that are related in some way to my city, so maybe the flag colors or something in the seal. I'm just going to quickly look that up. Let's say Toronto flag, so a basic red and blue. We can use that as the basis, I like that simple. We'll just drag that into our Photoshop file just for a second. Now, here's a blue and a red. Am just using the color picker. I go here, the color picker, and I click on those. Those end up in my swatches here. Probably good to actually save these swatches. To do that, you just use a color picker to pick the color you want, and then down here in the color swatches, you just click new and give it a name if you want. Those are root colors and we'll just keep those for handy reference. For now, I'm just going to start with these colors, and then as I illustrate, I can change my mind and adjust them a little bit. Just to want to get too bagged down with the color choices right now. Now in our art folder, let's create the first layer, which is going to be our water. My water will probably be blue. I'm just going to go down here to the Feller Adjustment Layer, little icon here and go solid color and then pick the blue if it isn't already selected. The next thing will be to start making our land. Create a new layer, and press P for the Pen tool and start tracing somewhere on your map. Wherever it make sense. For me it's the shoreline. Down on the seal side. Tracing pretty much what I sketched in my own style when I started tracing with my pen tool over my sketch, I try and stay true to the lines emitted in the sketch with all the little tiny micro wobbles that follow the overall trajectory of it. There is a certain crisp quality to the shapes that I'm making. Once you've closed your shape, you just create a new solid color. Now this could be the red that we created in our swatches, which is crazy intense. Already I'm seeing that the red is going to be a bit of a problem. Maybe what I'll do for now is just to do a shade of the red, so it's not so contrasty and bright. This pink will do for now, we will just see where that goes. Make sure you have all your land. Getting your abyss land is actually pretty simple depending on how much detail there is in it. But I have a lake down here and then land. The next thing I'm going to do is roads. Now we could trace these roads, all using the Pen tool. You could do something like this if you wanted. If you want really nice crisp roads, that's definitely a way to do it. You just trace them with the Pen tool and then go here to fill them with a solid color and use one of your chosen colors. Here I can just see how my colors are working out. Maybe I just knock out a white. This is a technique that we saw a lot of in the examples that I showed you in those vintage maps. Now, I could make my roads all at the Pen tool with very hard edges like this. But I'd really like to make these roads with a brush and ink. I think it'll look a lot more soft and settled that way. What I'm going to do is use the sketch that I made with my pencil of my basemap. That pencil and paper sketch. I'm going to put it on a light table and trace over it with a brush. 13. Making Inky Marks and Lettering for the Base Map: It's time to finally get inky. We're going to get away from our computers, we are going to get our ink in our paintbrushes, and we're going to start making all of our inky marks for the map. In this demonstration, I actually do all the inking for the base map in one go. You'll remember the pencil and paper sketch we did of our base map, I'm returning to that, I'm going to put it on my light table and use that to trace my inky marks over, and that will get the roads exactly where I want them to be. Now, I'm going to do some of the roads separately, just so I have more control and take out them into Photoshop to move them around if I need to. I'm using paper for my sketchbook now, which has more texture. This is the sketch for paper I'm using, you can use anything you want. You could even use your printer paper if you wanted. Now I'm trying to choose what brush I'll use, I've a variety of sizes and shapes that I could go with. I have this flat quarter inch brush with long bristles, I have a smaller flat brush, and a couple round tapers, a smaller one and a bigger one. This is one of my favorite brushes to use. I like how the long bristles hold a lot more ink and water, and I can do longer lines without having to dip back into the ink a lot. Rounder ones are nice, but it's harder to get a nice uniform width road, if that's what you're going for. I do have this really tiny chisel tipped flat paintbrush, but because the bristles are so short, it's not going to hold a lot of ink, I'm going to be dipping in water a lot. But I could give it a try, if you find you're running out, just let it go right to the end, if you need to go back over it, it could be fine, or you can just let the dried out part of the brush or be part of the charm. Doing the roads separately in different stages allows you to correct mistakes more easy. Right now I'm just doing my east-west road, so, my horizontal roads, and that way, I can easily redo a road without intersecting with the north-south road and having to edit that one also. I'm also working from the top-left to the lower-right, so that I don't get my hand in wet ink. I just going to use this sheet here for my horizontal roads, any roads don't intersect. I broke my rule here, because I guess I just lost track there. But I'll just leave this as it's, this look pretty good to me, and I can still put more things on this sheet, like some of these dots later once I'm done doing the roads. I've also managed to plot out my railroad track separately. It cuts across the whole map, and I just found some space on the bottom of my paper to do that. I could hand ink every single one of those little hash marks that make it look like a railroad, but what I like to do, to save time and also because it adds some consistency to the mark making, is just separately make those hashes, and then I will just copy and paste those in Photoshop all the way up. Now a little trick for things like this. If you'd like things to me super consistent, even though they're made by hand, I printed this grid of lines, this is not really great, they're lines. Then what I do, is I just stick them behind my page, and when I'm inking, I can just follow these for equal spacing, which is really nice. Then I can try different sizes of line, and see how they work for me. Some other things we are going to need when we're scanning our base map in will be the dots for each icon, these dots show on a map where they belong. There's a nice circle stamp, and I can use those as my location markers. When you blot things like that, the ink will be thicker. You want to make sure that that ink is dry before you rub your hand over it or scan it. Now for waves, I like to use my dead pen and just do a few that I can cut and paste later, so, just groups of waves, not too many, and then you can copy and paste them through your water. On my sketch, I also have roughed in some parks. That's a good opportunity to use some brush textures for those, and maybe try some different textures for the art, maybe what I've just done doesn't look grassy enough. Just do some [inaudible] thing, so this is just an old abused brush. If you want, you can use some of these patterns repeated just by copying and paste them. One thing we've totally ignored up to this point, the texture of the actual land. Right in our Photoshop file, those shapes and those solid colors are just very solid. There's no actual handmade textures, anything. I'm going to just make some texture that I can apply to the actual like land and water. Some things that make good textures are, if you have it, you can use the brayer and some speed ball ink, and then you can just roll broad areas of ink. You could also get the largest brush you have. Even if it's like a hoax hold painting brush, and create a wash of water. I just made a wash with ink and water, and I'm going to make just broad swaths with beautiful watercolors texture. Try different sizes, and I'm going just try the darkest ink that I can deal with this brush. I think this might be a nice. If you make a broad enough texture of your paint, these interesting edges that you get can actually just frame your map by themselves. I'll show you what I mean when we get this into Photoshop. While we're here inking, it might be a good time to actually start making some of our labels. You can have you sketch nearby for reference. Again, have your sketch book paper. I told you earlier about this grid that I use to make sure that I have evenly spaced lines. This is also perfect for lettering if you want to keep your lines straight. I just keep that under my sketch book paper. Yeah, no big innovation here. I like to use the thinnest nib pen than I have. But then latter, each different thing in its own way. All the icons will be labeled in one way. For me, I'm going to do something a little bit bigger. [inaudible] These are my icon labels. Now I'm going to do my street names. Street names, I'm going to do much smaller and in all uppercase for regularity and legibility. Now for the parts, I'll do a different style. Let's do the water first. All caps, oblique, or italic, or water, that's what I like to do. Here we want some tips on how to elaborate the different things in your map, the water, the neighborhoods, the town names, the street names. Take a look at an actual map and see what a real map maker [inaudible]. As long as you're consistent, it doesn't matter what style you apply to the different categories of things. Always do water the same. Always do street names the same. Should be good. 14. Bringing Map Ink into Photoshop: We've made our inky marks on paper, and now it's time to go back to the computer. We're going to scan those in, and we're going to place them into our file and really start to see our base map come to life with labels, roads, and other inky textures. With your scanning software open, make sure that the color setting is set to gray scale or black and white, and set the resolution to at least 300. I like to scan in 600 just to make sure I get as much information and resolution as possible, and usually ends up being very useful to me. You can scan your inky scans to your illustrations folder. I often make a separate folder called scans, just to keep track of all the possible scans that I might make in a project and they don't get all mixed up with my illustration files. Once you scan your inky textures, you can open the files in Photoshop and just adjust the black and white levels in each of them, so that you remove all the background noise of the page texture and you're just left with the nice black. The black marks. I'm just going to rotate this the right way, and use my levels adjustment here. What I'm going for here is, I want a balance of maintaining some of the texture of the paper coming through while also having a nice strong mark. It makes a little bit more contrasty, push the blacks a bit. We can go and do that to all our files now while we're at it. Detail. But you can actually now really see how the texture of the sketchbook paper really affects the quality of the marks. You'll especially see that here. One of my favorite things to do is zooming in really close in a high res scan of my inky marks and just beautiful textures and patterns. You will find that especially if heating broad swaths of texture, as I did here, where it's very wet and it wets the page, the page is going to start rippling and buckling because of how expands of the moisture, and so you really need to mess around with their levels to get rid of this as much as possible. In my case, I'm going to make this really dark and contrasty, so that the texture itself end up that being a little bit more subtle. You don't want your map to look like a wet page, we'll try this. It's pretty extreme, but we may have to go back and try something else. Especially for lettering, you you want to get right in there and zoom in, and then make sure that the edges are really crisp. You can just get that by pushing the dark slider to the middle and then the white slider or more toward the middle. I'm going to start with the background texture, so I'll just use the selection tool and copy that, and go to your map file. You can just paste that texture down here just to see if it's big enough. Now, you remember we scanned at 600 DPI and our map is 300 DPI, so this texture is just about twice as big as it needs to be. For now, I can just shrink this down. If it looks like I'm skipping a few steps here, be sure to check out my inky illustrations class where I show you exactly how I take these textures and work with them. But I'll do my best to describe most of the things I'm doing here. I've just created a texture small enough to fit within the borders, and this is just a layer here in my Layers panel. Let's now select all and then let's just cut it so we can go Command X to cut it out. We're now going to go in our Channels Panel. Window channels, and then you should get this window here. We're going to create a new channel, you click on this little new and you'll get an Alpha one layer. Now, it's black and we want it to be white because the background of the image we just cut is white. If you just hit Command I to invert and then paste, now, we'd need to do one more step here and that's we're going to do Command I again. We're going to invert that one more time, so that we get the reverse of that image and now we get a black border. Anywhere that's white, I should say, is going to give us a positive image, and anywhere that's black is going to give us a negative. You just hit Command while clicking on your Alpha channel thumbnail. What that does is, it loads the selection mask in the exact image of that Alpha channel. Once you have your Alpha channel loaded as a selection mask, go to the land shape that you made. What we're going to do is apply that mask to this layer so that it takes on the texture and the shape. Here is a little button down here at the bottom of the layers panel called Add Layer Mask. If you just click that, that's going to automatically apply that Alpha channel texture we made to that colorful. We can actually go and do the same to the water as well. It will just reload that Alpha channels. The alpha channel and the layers here, if you can still see it, you hit Command and then click the thumbnail, the Alpha channel, and you can apply it to this blue as well. Now, it looks like the blue already has a layer mask on it. This white box here. You can first just delete that white box if you have that there, and then you're just left with the fill, the color fill, and then go down to the little Add Layer Mask button at the bottom of your Layers panel. You now have beautifully textured land and water. Now, the water of course is the entire texture, whereas the land sits over it and you can see that blue coming through it, and especially where you have these more subtle bit, it is actually a little bit unnatural looking, this weird blue cast coming through. What we really ideally would want is just the pink up here and just the blue down there. There's a way to do that. If you go back to your land shape, so mine is just pink one on layer 2. You select that in the Layers panel and then go to your path selection tool here in the toolbar, or press A. If you press A and you got a white arrow, just hold Shift and press it again and you'll get a black arrow. Then use that to click and select that land shape that you made. Now, if your landscape has islands or other bits, you're going to have to hold shift and click all the bits so that they're all selected. Once you have them selected, you can copy them by hitting Command C, and then you want to apply this path also to the water. Click on the water color and now Command V or paste, and you've applied that mask to the water. Now, of course, we did the exact opposite of what we wanted to do. We've just put the blue under the pink and that doesn't solve our problem at all. What we need to do is invert the path so that it's the opposite, so press the minus key. Now, there's a chance that that won't work for you. If you've pasted your mask on to the blue layer and you see it like this, just go down to your paths panel and make sure that the fill shape path that corresponds to the layer is selected. In this case, it's this one. It's color fill one, and this is color fill one, they correspond, and what you do is you make sure that your path is selected. You can either just drag across the entire document to select everything or you can go and hand pick everything holding Shift. Then to invert that mask you just press the minus key. That's the same thing as going up here to your path operations and saying subtract from front shape, and you'll remember that from the inky illustrations class. We have our land and our water and a nice texture. Now it's time to maybe start adding some roads. What we can do is just create a new layer group called Roads and we can start to see that as a nice, tidy place to keep all the roads that we paste into there. I'm just going to copy and paste each piece of road one by one so that they're easier to move around in here if I need to. The first thing I'm just going to do is paste that here as a layer, and this road belongs up here, and I'm just going to shrink it down using the Transform tool until it fits where it should. Once it's the right size I'm going to again just copy that layer by selecting it all and then copying it and then I'm going to paste it as a new alpha channel. We're going to delete this alpha channel and create a new one. Make sure it's white, a white background by inverting it; Command I. Now paste that piece of road that you copied in here. Now we have to make this inverted by Command I or going Command I, and to load a selection mask from that piece of road we hit Command and click the alpha channel. Now we're going to go to our Roads folder here and just create a brand new layer made out of that piece of road. 15. Starting the Icon Illustrations: This is the part where we start building the base illustration for the icons. This is the part before startling extras, just like we did with the base map, we lay down this color for the land and water. Now, we're going to use the same techniques to lay down color and the general structure for each individual icon. So far in our illustration, we have all of our layers neatly organized in layer groups. This is just a nice, convenient way of staying organized. We will continue to organize our layers in this way for the icons as well. Turning on our sketch layer group here, let's just see how the illustration, as it is so far, lines up against the sketch. No big surprises here, everything's pretty much where I sketched it to be. The next thing we want to do is just use the sketch of the icons. We can use these sketches, of course, to start building our icons. Now going back to the art layer group. I'm going to start illustrating my little Italy icon. I'm going to make a new layer. Then I'm going to create a new layer group. That layer that I just made can go into that layer group if it doesn't automatically. We're going to call this layer group little Italy. You probably want to make sure that your icons are the topmost layers in your layers panel, so that they're not hiding under elements of your base map. What I'm going to do is, use the pen tool to trace over the shape of the sign, but the sign has different colors in it in other parts that I want to actually make sure that they stay within the shapes of the overall sign. Within the little Italy layer group, let's just select this layer, and mine is layer two. I'm just going to actually create, put that in and one more group, this tick Command G there. We could mean that later. But let's just start creating our path using the pen tool. I've closed my path. Now, if you have your paths layer open here, you can find this path in the Window menu. Go to paths to find it. The path you just made is called Work Path. Let's use the past select tool or A to select it. What we want to do is apply that to the group we just made, group one. What I'm going to do is cut that, Command X. Then making sure group is selected. Group one is selected here. I'm now going to paste that, Command V. You'll see both in the layers panel that it has been applied to the group you can see here. You can also see in the paths panel how it's been applied. Now everything we create within this group, group one, which we can call sign, just for convenience, will be within that shape. Right now nothing is no X, so we see nothing, but let us create a solid color. I want to make it white as a base color. I'm going to create the first color, or the top half of the sign. It's supposed to be green, but I only have blue to work with here. Blue, black, and red. I'm going to use blue. Creating using a pen tool, just creating a path that blocks in where that color will be. I'm within the sign layer group, which is masked. Now I'm going to use the blue that I had picked out and hit Okay. Even though I created just a block of blue, it's nicely massed within the sign shape. The next thing to do, of course, will just be in your paths panel, if you have it open, just click out so you don't have that shape selected anymore. We're now going to create a new layer for the red, the bottom of the side. Again, I could just make an overall block of color because it will be masked by the sign shape. Now, of course, this looks a little bit more like France, but for all intents and purposes, it's working. I'm going to go and make the rest of this sign here. I'm going to make the base illustration without the textures for all the icons, each in their own separate little layer group. Before I do that, just one more thing. I want to create this little pointy part of the sign. If I'm within the sign group and I create that pointy part, you will see that it doesn't show. It doesn't show because It's hiding behind this layer mask. What I can do, is I can just drag that out of the layer mask for that layer group and then we can see it and create a little stem on that. What just happened? I created my layer group and I'm here on this shape. Why is the color not showing up? That's because this is a quirk in Photoshop. Sometimes when you go to create a new path after filling in the last path with color, it does this weird thing where it selects two layers in the paths panel, and the long and short of it is that it shouldn't do this. I don't know why it does this, but just click out of it. Then with your color fill shape selected in the layers panel, and making sure that the path itself is selected in the paths panel, you can use the path selection tool and just click it. As long as that's selected, and work path is not selected, you can add to a shape and see the effect right away. This is a problem I encounter in all of my Skillshare classes. Because I use this technique so often. I'm now going to make a new layer group for my next icon, which would be this beer mug here. Create a new layer, and then put it into a layer group, and name it. For more complex icons like this, you probably have a lot of layer groups within your top group. Sometimes it's a black, a full on black where it's just too dark to see a sketch through. In which case, you can for the moment just turn down the opacity, so that you can see what you need to trace over beneath, and then you can turn it back up later when you're done. You can also maybe at one point choose to change your blacks everywhere throughout your whole illustration to something a little less intense. Maybe I'll choose a black that's based on the red. I'll just make it a really darkened tint of the red. The reason I did that is because even though it just looks like a darker black, it picks up the tone of the red, which brings a lot more cohesion. At some point I can just go all around and use this color. In fact, I can just add it to my swatches now. The benefit of a not so intense black like this, like I said, you see the sketch below. Also it's just not as harsh looking, so you may choose to just have something a little less intense. One of the advantages of putting all my row names into a single layer, assuming they're all the same color. I can double-click on that layer group, and then add a color overlay, and change a color for all of the roads simultaneously as a group. I have laid down the base illustrations for the icons. I have yet to do the textures. But lets just see, I'm collapsing all my layers here so I can see them all at a glance. I can actually just select all of those layer groups and group them again, because groups are our best friends here. Just call this whole thing icons, I can just turn on and off that entire group. Just if I ever need to see what's going on behind them. I'm also going to turn off the sketches for a second. To see where you're going to need to add contrast or else remove things altogether. The coffee cup, the white at this intersection of the white roads is going to need some contrasts. Now, if I were to turn back around my sketches, you'll see my icon sketch is a little offset. Now, I can actually just go right into their course and move it over top again, just so I have that conveniently behind it. Now that I have my base illustration for the icons, it's time to start making factors for those. 16. Adding Inky Bits and Lettering to the Icons: Do you remember these, the sketches we made for the icons way back a few lessons ago? Well, these are going to come in handy now as we start creating the e-marks and textures, or our icons. What we're going to do is, lay these onto our life table, and then sketch our experts over them, especially where there's details like lines. I do like to do my lettering separately and then just work it into the icons later, because then I can do the lettering because I can spend more attention on the details of the lettering. I have my sketchbook paper here again and my original sketches of my icons, and now I'm just going to do whatever inking line work I can do with the nib pen. The nip pen is my finest point, and I can do all this smaller details. Now, I just do only the parts that are structural. I'm not going to outlines, the things that have already filled in with color. So a box around a window, it gives it a little bit of extra dimension, but I'm not outlining the color like a coloring book, for instance. Some parts I will do separately. Like the texture for the roof, I'm going to do that separately. So that's a extra detail. I'm also going to do the lettering separately here. So maybe this little dude out here. Now I'm breaking my rule when you're inking, starting on the top left and working your way right and down. Because now that I want to do this tower here, high risks will be right over that [inaudible]. So that I can do for analysis, shift the page. Where the texture of the roof shingles, I can just ignore the shape of the peaks for now, those gables and just draw straight through because I can mask those out with the paths in photo-shop. The lettering, I'm going to use a brush and then I'll shrink it down a bit. I often make letters larger than they need to be, and then when I scan them and place them smaller, they look much better. Otherwise. For some part of the sign where it says, Little Italy, the font was a little bit rounded, I'm going to use this round tip speed ball pen, which is a bit tricky to use, especially on sketchbook paper, which isn't smooth. Okay. So I've done the inking for all of the line work and even some other textures, and now I'm going to really look for other textures that I could be making. For the most part, the lettering and the line work is going to suffice. I just need a little bit of texture for the top of the beer and something for the trees. So at this stage, as it's just a good time to look for ways of doing just additional textures. We are now back at our illustration on the computer, and now, we're going to scan in the line work and patches that we made using ink. As usual, you want to adjust the levels to get the widest whites and the darkest [inaudible]. I'm going to first grab the line work for my lifeguard tower here. I believe this was all one piece. Go into the icons layer group, and then to the layer group that you're line or texture are suppose to go into, and then you just create a new layer at the top there, and then we're going to go open our layers panel, and just delete that alpha 1, and then create a new alpha 1 in the layers panel, and then command I to invert and then paste your copied line work, and then what you might want to do if it's too big for the canvas as mine, is I'm just going to hit "Command T" and make it smaller. So it fits. Just double-click that, and I'm going to deselect the selection right now, and that's Command D, and I'm going to invert, and then command, click "Alpha Channel". That loads the selection mask of all the white areas, now I'm going to create my solid color here in the layers panel. I didn't make this black, this like not quite black, black that everything else is, but if I make the actual line work actual black, then it will at least contrast over top even the black in my map, so, I'm going to try that for now, and that just allows a little bit of detail to pop over top. Right now my new layer is just a color mask here, and what are color layer? What I want to do is just create that into a smart objects so that I can resize it without losing image quality. Just resize it until it matches the size of your sketch that it might be a little bit on the wrong angle so you can just rotate it a tad. When you're happy, you can turn off the sketches layer group, just the seal it's looking, you'll start to see things like this, like I outlined the door when I didn't need to. If you do something in your line work that you want to remove, you can do that non-destructively by selecting the Smart Objects part. Line work is on. Then down here to the left of the little fill or Adjustment Layer menu. So you just go a little bit to the left there, just one to the left is little button called Add Layer Mask, you just hit that and it creates us white thumbnail. Click on the White Thumbnail, and then you can use your eraser tool, you can press "E" or "Toolbar" over here on the side, and make sure that the eraser size is small enough that you can have some precision. In my case, what I want to do is just erase that extra line which is clashing with my door there. This is a nondestructive Edit, and I'll show you what I mean by that in a second. I'm going to erase this. Technically, I'm not erasing it, I'm just masking over it. What I've done in this little white thumbnail is I've drawn a mask over using the eraser tool. If I shift and click that thumbnail, I can disable the layer mask thumbnail, and you can see that it's still there. I'm going shift click that thumbnail just to reinstate the mask. Now, if you're in the eraser tool and you're erasing on that layer mask and you find that you're not erasing and in fact it's just adding or just not having an effect, makes sure that you're near color palette, that the background color is black. Once you do that and you're hitting a race, then you'll get the effect you need. To do that real quick, you can just press X and it toggles, back in away foreground and background. Then still while I'm here, I'm going to just pull this door shape in a tad because I don't want that black door running into the ink line where quantity to be now a little bit of a cleaner space there. I can use this, use lines that I created for a roof shingles. Right here, I'm going to just click the red rooftop of the lifeguard station and I'm going to do the whole thing over again. I'm going to create a new layer in the layers panel, I'm going to go into the alpha channel that I created and just delete that, create a new one. I might try the gray, just create that into a smart object. Now, if I set that layer to multiply, I get a nice tint or shade of the red. I'm noticing also that the lines I drew a pretty wobbly, I quickly straightening out a wobbly line if there only straight lines is just a stretch it. That is still got a nice handmade look but it's much straighter now, because something I might do is make the tiles a little bit finer and here I have some of the ladder tower here. Just over the roof which I don't like, so I'm going to go back to my layer mask that white thumbnail with my eraser tool hitting E, and just erasing stuff that shouldn't be there. If you over erase, you can just hit X to toggle. That's an improvement. There's some mistakes here that I can correct like this drip. Little Italy is not quite dark enough, so I'm just going to adjust that more. Then just here in the scan file, I can just make sure that my background is set to white, and then erase that. This is a smaller eraser so it's not as smooth and just wobble it a bit. Here we go. Now, I should space out these letters which I could do just by opening this object here. To increase the spacing here, I've opened the smart object and I'm making sure my background colors selected black. I just click into the black Alpha channel mask on the actual layer in the layers panel. That's that black thumbnail, and using the selection tool, I grabbed areas of the mask that I want to move. Once it's selected, I can either click and drag or I can use the keyboard arrows and just nudge them into the positions I want. Once I am satisfied with the spacing, I can just save and return to the mean illustration files. When you have your lettering on separate layers like this, just copy the whole thing, let's just paste it right directly into the layers. Here, ready to go. Probably hiding in the layer mask, there it is and we're going to just shrink that down. Let's shrink it so that we can fit street. Then we'll just copy this and we can hit command shift J, what that does is it just cuts it out, puts it on the top and that looks good to me. So this is layer nine and 10. What we can do now is just hit command E to merge the layers, or we could just go merge layers. Now, what we can do is cut that and do our thing, Smart Object that up, bring it into the sign and use the transform tool, shrink that down. We have ourselves a lovely little sign. Now, we're just finishing up the illustration by adding the inky marks and textures and lettering to all the icons. Once we're done this, we can take a step back, and just make sure the icons are sitting well over top the map and also, to see if we've messed anything in terms of textures in details, and add the finishing touches which we'll do in the next lesson. 17. Completing the Map: Now we're adding the finishing touches to the map. This is the very last step and then we're done. Already our maps are looking pretty good, pretty finished. Just a matter of making sure that we've included everything we want to include in the map. That's going to be things like, of course, the compass rose, it's going to be little secondary elements like trees and little characters. In my case, I'm going to be putting some characters in my map like people on bikes and a streetcar, or tune in some cars. I'm also going to be moving the icons around and other elements in the map around just to make sure that I get a balance. Because as I'm bringing more elements into the map, the relationship of everything changes a little bit. I'm just using my eyes to move things around and make sure that there's a nice balance. First thing I'm doing is just moving things around to make sure everything fits nicely. Here, what I'm doing is I'm using a line that I previously scanned in to become my color line and I'm playing around with how I'm going to associate the points on the map with the icons and the titles. You'll see as I'm going through here, its a back and forth and seeing how something works and then making a little adjustment here, making a little adjustment there. That's what you're going to see me doing here. I'm using layer masks for these smart objects to erase any extra line there. I had forgotten to include the Leslieville label so I'm just adding that here. Sometimes what I like to do, so titles stand on their own a little better. It's create a background to them and my go-to kind of style or technique is to just make it look like cut-out piece of paper behind it. Another problem I'm facing here with the CN Tower is such a tall and skinny shape. I don't want it to look like it's coming out of the water, which I might end up having to do as a compromise. But I'm trying here to associate it closer to its actual place in the city. But I am finding it a little bit of a challenge. How do I place it close to that dot? Have the text underneath and, not collide with other elements in the map. You'll see that I have some brain waves here. I also decided that the the color line I had been using was a bit too fat and so, I'm creating a new and skinnier color line to use, which is a little bit more elegant and less distracting, I find. Here I'm playing a little bit with having everything be at 45-degree angles. Later on I figured that that's maybe a bit too rigid for this particular map. Still playing around with where to place my point of interest labels. I've decided to give all of them, that little cut out paper background so they stand on their own and associate better with the map points. Now I'm working on the title here and I made some lettering for the map title. Here I'm just assembling them on a layer before I turn them into a smart object. I found a nice vacant spot down there near the bottom of the map. Just working that out there. Also try and figure what color I want it to be. This is where you can see I've found a place for the CN tower. Here is my compass rose. A first attempt at the compass rose. Let's see what color works. This one to me ended up feeling a little bit out of place. Adding some of my secondary icons, so just really tiny little things and I'm making them here. I've been trying them in blue and multiplying them over the map so they feel a little bit more integrated. These really add a lot of fun to map. This is quintessential Toronto streetcar and there is a streetcar line on Queen Street. I have to put it on that street. I'm playing around it, putting a background behind the streetcar, seeing if that works. I feel like it makes that streetcar standout too much so I later find a different solution. Now I'm making some little trees to go around, playing around the blue stems to match the blue of the other secondary icons and then white foliage. Different kind of tree. I'm finding the icons in blue, wasn't working for me, so I turned them off to black and now I of course have to change the color of the foliage on the trees as well. Made them a bit smaller too. They were a bit too big for me. Adding a bit of variety in the kinds of trees helps. Adding a background to the title so it stands out over the map more. My final compass rose style, just the simple and a more whimsical line quality than I had before. Of course, taking a typo I had put in twice in the subtitle. Playing around a look whether that sign should be black or white. I ended up going with white. Then of course labels for Little Italy and Leslieville were done increasing names right on their signs, aspiring though just to give a better room. Then just added color lights to that. Ensure street names fit. 18. Yay! Conclusion: Always [inaudible] okays guys. I think we're done. We have made an illustrated map and we have done a lot of work. Congratulations, great work guys. We have done a lot of research and brainstorming and sketching, lots and lots of sketching. Very methodically adding layers, Photoshop, making our ink textures, bringing them in probably a lot of play and experimentation, trial and error. Hopefully not too much pulling up hair and frustration. But, this was the first major project using my inky illustrations techniques that I've taught here on Skillshare and that we've done together. I'm super proud of you guys for following me all along. I know that it's really a lot of little things involved and there is definitely going to be things that I missed. What I really wanted to do was show you as much of an overview of making maps as possible. So if there's anything that I've done in my map that you've seen me do that I didn't explain. We use a hit me up in the comments section on this class and I'd be more than happy to help you work through whatever questions you have. Now it's up to you guys. I'd love for you guys to share your projects. Be sure to put it up on the projects folder here and if you are going to put it on Instagram or any other of your social media please tag it, hashtag inky maps and that will be amazing for us to be able to find what you guys have done. Good work. I'll see you in the project section down below.