May The Tea-Leaves Decide. (Maps)

[wrentemple]

This post is about making maps, and your methods!

This is a map from my "work in progress" of a place called The Heartlands (Virtual cookie if you can guess why) or Middle Kingdoms.

With a general shape in mind I'll proceed dump tea bags all over my chosen piece of paper. In this case it's four pieces of A3 paper masked together on the back and taped to my spare drawing desk :')

When it's dried I'll go in with inks and punch in border lines and define the land masses.
Then I'll take it to my local resource centre and use their super large scanner whilst looking like a crazy man.

Then using the computer I'll level out colours drop in map lines, city markers and topography.

I shall be updating this when finished!!
Why tea bags?
1. I like making a mess
2. If I did it by hand I'd end up agonizing over specific shapes.

If you have any maps or favourite methods post them below. I always like seeing how differently two artists approach the same thing

[joannekwan]

Here's a map I did in Illustrator. I just throw a bunch of anchor points on the line and move them around to create inlets and things. It's like sculpting, but 2D. ^^
I think I need more rivers and lakes though. haha

[AngieVX]

Cool method! I always lose maps, and have to re-draw them every now and then.

[Zanreo]

Haha, well that sounds like a fun way of "generating" things like that

[johndanims]

I like your method. My John D Anims logo (as seen as my avatar) was created in a similar way. It's just a big ink splot I made with real ink on real paper. I figured drawing it out would look too fake and uniform and I didn't want to rip anyone elses shape off as I wanted it to be 100% my own original design. I spread some of it out using a stick to get a more messy shape. As I wasn't bothered about the quality of the image and it was just the shape I wanted I took a picture of it using my webcam and I did all the manipulating I needed to make the rest of the logo on my PC.

[winglesscomic]

That's actually really cool!

One method I recall is that if you're having trouble with a starting landmass, you should pick a random spot on google, zoom in and use the edges of where the land touches the ocean as parts of your continents.

I'm not particularly good with maps, so I kinda shit this one out of my ass and had my geography-inclined friend correct various things on it. (it ain't done, no sir)

[rainbowolfe]

I made (what I think is called) a political map of my world! Well. part of my world anyways. The northern-ish hemisphere.
Since my land was based on a pre-existing place I used actual land-places to get the squiggly look on the edge. Then I kinda carved it out into different areas (and had a whole bunch of fun naming it).

What you're looking at now is technically North America

It's not totally done, but it gets the point across....

[gateofselidor]

I draw some vague blocks in a rough layout, and then gradually refine it until I get a shape I'm happy with. After that, I start editing the coastline, adding islands and other details. I need to make some edits to this particular map, to change some of the terrain and address some inaccuracies in the river behaviour. At some point I want to add more detail and texture in as well.