# Mapmaking Discussion & Philosophy (WIP/Critique) > General and Miscellaneous Mapping >  jshoer's workshop

## jshoer

I see several workshop threads around, and since I've been doing some more studies lately...hey, I should have one!

I will start off with a shallow perspective view of an island that I did over the course of a day last weekend. I wanted to play with the perspective, the mountains, the jungle, and the colors, inspired by some things I saw in Max's workshop thread, and somewhere else where Max had suggestions about jungles. (Thanks, Max!) While maybe a little too slanting a view for a real map, there are definitely elements here I want to draw from.



Pen and colored pencil.

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## ChickPea

Very pretty! The jungle looks good though I think I would have swapped the colour of it with the surrounding greenery. The colour you've chosen has a blue-ish tone (on my monitor, anyway) and this makes it feel a little colder compared to the brighter green that surrounds it. It's a very nice pic though.  :Smile:

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## jshoer

Thanks ChickPea. I see what you mean about the blue tinge. I was experimenting with new pencils! Glad I experimented first.  :Smile:

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## jshoer

I just bought some Prismacolor markers to try out putting shadows on overhead line art maps. I've never done that style map before, but I see a lot of potential for being able to add gray toned shading to line art. Here's my first test piece, which I whipped up in an hour or two. (I got impatient on completing the outer wall. Hence the name of the stronghold!)

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## jshoer

This Moleskine obviously needed a fantasy novel lead-in...

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## jshoer

I was feeling very autumn-y, so I put this together over the last couple days.



I guess this one isn't really a map so much as a landscape. I'm practicing my perspective, trying out ways to represent color trees in the fall, practicing with color pencil shading (without painting afterward), trying to get a really bright light by leaving whitespace, and using my art markers to put down shadows before I colored over it all with pencil.

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## Greg

Lovely colours and perspective in this piece jshoer! I think a bit more shadowing could have helped particularly around the house on the right and the front trees, but otherwise it looks pretty...well...pretty.  :Smile: 

I'm afraid though, I can't unsee all those trees as anything but a massive load of balloons like in Up. Still cool, whichever way you look at it.  :Very Happy:

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## Mouse

Oh!

What a lovely spectral sense of colour you have  :Very Happy:  

IMHO - If you wanted to turn something like that into a map, I think you might want to fly a bit higher and look down a bit more than you are with this POV.  A few paths through the trees might also help, but its lovely as it is as a hybrid 'mapscape'.

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## jshoer

> Lovely colours and perspective in this piece jshoer! I think a bit more shadowing could have helped particularly around the house on the right and the front trees, but otherwise it looks pretty...well...pretty. 
> 
> I'm afraid though, I can't unsee all those trees as anything but a massive load of balloons like in Up. Still cool, whichever way you look at it.


Ha!  :Very Happy: 

Yeah, it was interesting to me to find out how the shadows came out better in some places than others. I used the same marker for all the shadows, and although it's easy to see on the yellow and orange trees, it's completely hidden under the green ones, as well as many of the red and brown. A darker marker would have been good for some of those, and for the deeper shadows where you mentioned. I'm learning about how these things layer up - the shadows looked _great_ and consistent before I colored it all in!




> Oh!
> 
> What a lovely spectral sense of colour you have  
> 
> IMHO - If you wanted to turn something like that into a map, I think you might want to fly a bit higher and look down a bit more than you are with this POV.  A few paths through the trees might also help, but its lovely as it is as a hybrid 'mapscape'.


Thanks! I totally agree; this could be a low-perspective map if the point of view was just a little higher. I tried to put a meandering break in the trees where the river runs. That turned out to be more difficult than I anticipated so I didn't do all that much. I'm glad you like the colors!

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## ChickPea

Lovely colours with this, Joseph. I'd enjoy a wander through those woods (assuming you haven't hidden any nasty surprises in there!)  :Very Happy:

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## jshoer

I've been quiet lately, on account of a cross-country move and the a whole bunch of assorted travel. But I have still been mapping!

First, holiday visits apparently mean playing with my father-in-law's laser engraver. So, here's a topographic map engraved onto a four-inch leather coaster. He made me a set of four:



Next, I splurged on a Microsoft Surface for myself and I've been using it to try out cartography in Photoshop. I don't quite like it as much as doing things by hand, but the barrier to picking it up for a little playing around is much lower. Plus, layers and undo buttons are a thing! Anyway, I am quite pleased with some of the things I've been able to do so far. Here is my first (!!!) mountain-shading study, hand-drawn in Photoshop:

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## ThomasR

It seems you're gonna do wonders with your tablet. A piece of advice : do not use the undo button too much, draw freely and confidently. I really love the engraved piece !

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## jshoer

*pokes head into workshop*

*blows dust off all the shelves*

Whew! It's been some time since I came in here. But I am long overdue.

It's fitting that the last person here was Thomas, because some of his notebook work recently is what inspired me to get a small book to fill with study maps. I'm well on my way now, and I'll need this workshop bench here....

First up: a map drawn on a 2 hour plane flight, basically just to play with some label styles I shamelessly swiped from Diamond, as well as some new grass and forest styles.


Next, trying out some new styles for oceans in a map drawn one night while I was on the graveyard shift:


After that, a village map drawn over the course of several following nights. It made a good base for some marker effects after I got back on normal hours.


Then, a new experiment! An inverted galaxy, done by stippling black, blue, and red pens and then adding a marker overlay. The symbols are just crud, but I'm happy with the stippling and I even remembered to populate the center with more blue stars and the outer rims with more red ones.


Last, more a set of experiments than a complete map - but after seeing the end credit design of Black Panther, I couldn't get some of the patterns out of my head. I think the mountains and rivers worked really well right off the bat, but I had a hard time pinning down a forest and an ocean style. In the end, I think I like the ocean on the western border of the map very much over the southern and northeastern attempts. One of the pinwheel-y forest styles in the center seems like the best abstract patterned forest style. Of course I thought I would do this with a brush pen, which added a whole new thing to it.


Edit: corrected a misattribution. I swiped that label style from Diamond's "The Great Railroad" January 2018 challenge entry. It wasn't Ilanthar.

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## Arkidemis

I had to take a double take a #3, I thought it was digital and you just had the notebook as a background picture. They all look good though!

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## elboe

Very nice. I really like the coloring and your mixing of the markers and pencils.

I did noticed on some of these, and in some of your finished maps, you are getting a lot of bleed and puddling of the markers. I know many of these are just quick studies and sketches, but that's the paper's fault. It looks like you are using sketch books and drawing paper. A good marker paper will do wonders with the Prismacolors. You can layer and blend the markers for smoother shadows, and they don't bleed as much. 

And maybe you know this, but I noticed it so I thought I'd mention it. But if you haven't used marker paper and you want to give it a try, you may end up buying a few different brands before you find your favorite. I haven't done marker for awhile but Bienfang Graphics 360 may be a good one to try first.

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## J.Edward

These look good  :Smile:

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## jshoer

> Very nice. I really like the coloring and your mixing of the markers and pencils.
> 
> I did noticed on some of these, and in some of your finished maps, you are getting a lot of bleed and puddling of the markers. I know many of these are just quick studies and sketches, but that's the paper's fault. It looks like you are using sketch books and drawing paper. A good marker paper will do wonders with the Prismacolors. You can layer and blend the markers for smoother shadows, and they don't bleed as much. 
> 
> And maybe you know this, but I noticed it so I thought I'd mention it. But if you haven't used marker paper and you want to give it a try, you may end up buying a few different brands before you find your favorite. I haven't done marker for awhile but Bienfang Graphics 360 may be a good one to try first.


Thanks!

I don't usually work with markers - my typical line art tools these days are Pigma Micron pens. I have a couple Copic pens, and I still favor some dip pens (which I used in the challenge we both entered). I use Bristol vellum most of the time for the pen-and-ink-and-colored-pencil work. Puddling of the ink from the dip pens is something I kind of see as a feature, not a bug; that challenge map had a big blob in the center-north, but I think it accentuates the hand-drawn nature of the map. Of course, that doesn't stop me from wishing I had been more careful and prevented the blob!

These studies from my last post are my most extensive use of Prismacolor markers yet - and they are actually in a Bee Paper marker notebook! It seemed to work pretty well with the pens, though I think I shot myself in the foot with the brush pen - I don't really know what I'm doing with that tool yet. Anyway, without too much marker experience, I certainly don't have a favorite marker paper. If I keep doing marker stuff, I'll have to look for some.  :Smile:

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## elboe

I'll have to check out that Bee Paper marker notebook, those last images you posted do look real good. I love working with markers, but I've gotten to spoiled working digitally. It's just not the same process though.

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## jshoer

I hear ya! I was really happy to start a notebook project after all that work on my tablet. I just like the feel of pen and paper much better than working on a tablet in Photoshop.

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## ThomasR

All five maps are gorgeous but the work you did on that village map ... Oh boy, it's fantastic !

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## Voolf

The galaxy is so NEAT.

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## Ilanthar

Cool! The village & the galaxy are particularly impressive.

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## jshoer

Thanks, everybody!

The next page contains a "real" version of the abstract pattern map...

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## jshoer

Here we go! Trying a couple things, including trying to make it look like the map is on a well-folded woven surface and adding annotations in a later hand - maybe a trader going through the unfamiliar land:

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## Diamond

I'm honored to be swiped from!   :Very Happy: 

I can only echo the rest when it comes to that village map - daaaaaamn.  And that galaxy map is pretty sweet too.

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## ThomasR

> Here we go! Trying a couple things, including trying to make it look like the map is on a well-folded woven surface and adding annotations in a later hand - maybe a trader going through the unfamiliar land:


I like it ! If I may propose an advice ... Scan it, throw a parchment background beneath, slightly erase the fabric marks and stain it. Ok, that's my answer to every hand drawn map these days but I think it could look cool. Add a fabric overlay and perhaps a layer with a greayscale fold set to hard light or linear light and you're set with a gorgeous map.

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## jshoer

> I like it ! If I may propose an advice ... Scan it, throw a parchment background beneath, slightly erase the fabric marks and stain it. Ok, that's my answer to every hand drawn map these days but I think it could look cool. Add a fabric overlay and perhaps a layer with a greayscale fold set to hard light or linear light and you're set with a gorgeous map.


Hmm, trying to step through your advice, and I came up with this...what do you think?


The layers are:
- a brown color on the bottom
- a fabric texture at 80% opacity normal
- a brown/black radial gradient along the border at 100% normal
- the hand-drawn map, set to multiply
- shadows: big, soft black brush at 30% opacity soft light, and then half the line erased with a harder brush
- same thing with a white brush for highlights

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## ThomasR

It looks pretty good ! I'd add some stains here and there and a bit more near the creases and borders and maybe, change the background from that bright brown to, maybe, a white in order to add a cast shadow to anchor your map on the background.

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## bkh1914

For a little more realism, you could do a displace along the fold lines to shift/distort the map line-work slightly and further make the map look like it is still slightly folded.  (Use the fold line highlight & shadow for the displace map.)

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## jshoer

Ooh, that was a cool trick! Anything else you think I can do?

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## ThomasR

OH YEAH ! is all I gotta say  :Smile:

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## jshoer

Here's a little tease...

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## ChickPea

This is gorgeous!

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## Narc

So cute  :Smile:

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## ThomasR

I love the way you showed the terraced terrain  :Smile:

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## jshoer

Thanks, guys! I want to really cram this one full of little details, and I'm working my way up to a more sandstone-y layer toward the top of the page.

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## MistyBeee

Oooh, such a lovely one !!

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## jshoer

Here's a fun one - I wanted to try doing a map with only black and white, no shading, and wanted to represent different polities with masks. Somehow it ended up being ancient-world-y. Negative space ended up being really important!

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## jshoer

...I suppose I should say that, if you don't like the rather pyramidal mountains in that one, while I was in the middle of working on it I doodled this on the page above. I like them much better (but I kept the same style as I finished the full map):

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## ThomasR

Lovely style !

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## jshoer

Two more sketchbook maps that I hadn't uploaded yet:

This one, I wanted to represent places with a little icon of something that place was known for. I also figured I would try experimenting with caterpillar hills. In the end, I don't like it, so I stopped. (One thing I do like, though, is the compass I stole from Thomas!  :Very Happy: )


Next, four maps in one - of the same river system. I was inspired by a recent trip to the Netherlands and Belgium. As I got thinking about all the different things the waterways represent in the Low Countries - agriculture, science and engineering work, defense, and so on - I wondered how I could depict all those things.

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## jshoer

Two more sketchbook projects! First is one where I was trying to mimic the raking perspective of another map on the guild:

I think I got some cool new textures for the grasslands and the sandy beaches.

The second came about because someone approached me with a commission on a hex grid - and not having one of those in my portfolio, I realized I should give it a go! So, here's an idea for a game-style map with four different terrain types and two cities.

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## Arimel

Both look really nice! I like how the hex map is not covered in the grid, the Y-things work pretty well! The perspective map is also really cool. The beech texture definitely works here. The beacons (lighthouses?) on the mountains are a neat touch!

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## jshoer

Thank you! I am happy with that beach texture, I think it's one of my better ideas for the perspective view.

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## jshoer

I have a few more maps from my sketchbook, that I haven't had a chance to post yet!

First is a map inspired by my flights over the US southwest desert: a strictly top-down view of mountains and topography.


Next up is a line art-heavy map, loosely inspired by The Dark Crystal and by some of the character sketches I've seen Ilanthar turn out recently. I plan to color this one digitally and post it again later.


I finished a third one, today, too, but decided to give it its very own thread.

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## Arimel

That second map is really cool. I like the 6 armed ?man? and the texture that you used for the water is really neat!

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## jshoer

Here are some test sketches of stellar objects for potential use on a space map. I meant for a few of them to be inverted, and tried several variants. What do you think?

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## KaiAeon

They look cool.

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