# Mapping Resources > Tutorials/How-To >  [Award Winner] Fastest town in the west

## Ascension

I had an idea and, like most of my messing around, my quick, rushed stuff comes out better than stuff I plan out for a month.  The experiment took 5 minutes (pic j), the tut took about 2 hours to put together.

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## tilt

very nice solution for a quick town ... I can picture the scenario... 
Player: We'll just rest for some days in this town - where is the bar?
GM: You'll rest HERE?... two secs....  opens photoshop... click click click... turn on printer.... BRrzzzzghh... rahhg... kachang... 
GM: Well, as you can see on the map the Inn is situated near the city square..  :Smile:

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## Raskat

Woow....excellent job ascension, excellent job! I'm in awe  :Very Happy: .

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## Steel General

By jove, he's done it again!  :Very Happy:

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## ravells

Fabulous! Great stuff again, big A!

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## Katto

Can be realized very quick and the result looks very good, too. Thanks for the tutorial.

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## Natai

Wow...
All hail Ascension!
Repped

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## LonewandererD

God I wish I had had something like this before. Bravo Ascension!

-D-

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## icedsnake

hehe looks neat ! im still no that good doing map ... ;( but i just don't give up ! Pretty good stuff right here.

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## bambua

Awesome tutorial I had a lot of fun with this one...I can see using this to fill in some of the towns in my world that I need to on the fly.  This also gave me some great idea for adding in quasi random objects using paths that I hadn't done before.  This is also the first map I did with my first wacom tablet, so it was nice to break it on something fun  :Very Happy:

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## Ascension

Looks pretty good, man.  Not sure you ended up with those black shapes on some of the roofs, though.  I'll look into it and see if I can reproduce that and then figure out how to eliminate them.  Otherwise, it's a good quick little thing totally meant as a stop-over place while adventuring.  Good job.

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## Notsonoble

A lot of the brush settings aren't in GIMP... so your random buildings aren't gonna work for that... just about everything else can be recreated though...

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## Ascension

Yeah but Gimp has image pipes so there's a trade-off.  If Adobe ever got around to making a dedicated art program instead of the catch-all that PS is they'd better damn well put image pipes in it.

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## mearrin69

Nice tut. Here's my attempt. Didn't quite get the same look as you but I like it. I just took the buildings where they lay but some judicious editing during the process would have improved the map some...and some of my roads enclosed areas that were too small to receive buildings (path there went away). 
M

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## Ascension

Good stuff, man.  Once you get used to the process and memorize it then it can take 5 minutes to do by hand or you could turn it into an action (after roads are drawn) and have it take 30 seconds.  Here's what I'm currently working based on this tut, the only thing that I drew were the road structure, and I used the Pen tool to help me there, and the river...everything else is automated.  This one isn't nearly as fast because I'm trying to emulate a hand draw look without drawing anything so I'm experimenting a lot.

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## mearrin69

Nice. Love the sketchy look you've got for the road border.
M

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## mixx

fantastic tutorial - exactly what I was looking for

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## bambua

> Looks pretty good, man.  Not sure you ended up with those black shapes on some of the roofs, though.  I'll look into it and see if I can reproduce that and then figure out how to eliminate them.  Otherwise, it's a good quick little thing totally meant as a stop-over place while adventuring.  Good job.


Yeah I'm not sure how that happens, honestly I may have missed a step or gazed over something quick.  This helped me a lot in a session on saturday night, I had the PC's end up at a town I had never fleshed out before.  I told them it was snack time took 5 minutes and boom town.

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## verdilak

> Good stuff, man.  Once you get used to the process and memorize it then it can take 5 minutes to do by hand or you could turn it into an action (after roads are drawn) and have it take 30 seconds.  Here's what I'm currently working based on this tut, the only thing that I drew were the road structure, and I used the Pen tool to help me there, and the river...everything else is automated.  This one isn't nearly as fast because I'm trying to emulate a hand draw look without drawing anything so I'm experimenting a lot.


I am brand new here... but I gotta ask, how did you do those buildings? Thats my biggest issue right now are buildings (are they a brush?). Also, the border for the roads and streets... ?

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## Ascension

The buildings are covered in the tut.  The road strokes I forget cuz it's been a while.  It has something to do with creating a selection of the roads, putting a stroke on that selection, then make a random clouds layer, select the white (or black), remove the clouds, hit the delete key.  Repeat the process for the next line.

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## verdilak

> The buildings are covered in the tut.  The road strokes I forget cuz it's been a while.  It has something to do with creating a selection of the roads, putting a stroke on that selection, then make a random clouds layer, select the white (or black), remove the clouds, hit the delete key.  Repeat the process for the next line.


I'm sorry. I figured it out and that I do not have a square pencil brush. All of my "buildings" were just huts heh.

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## verdilak

Thanks man! Just finished with the map and it looks much better than I could ever be accused of being able to create!

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## Ascension

Looks good, man.

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## DrVesuvius

Has anyone successfully translated this (very very cool) technique to the GIMP?

I can sort of see bits of it, but I'm still a relative GIMP newbie and can't quite put the whole thing together.

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## FeralBuddy

I hope I'm not reviving an old thread. First let me say that I loved how simple and straightforward this tutorial was. Just starting out, the parts on textures and the various blending option were very helpful!
I ran into the same issue with the black section of the building (which were deleted pixels). I think I didn't select the color to delete for Color Mode and the Stroke was showing through. Well, here's my attempt.
I didn't really like the default Clouds texture for the ponds, so I used my own. But it was perfect for the trees.

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## Ascension

Good stuff, dude.  Glad you liked the tut as well.  And don't worry about reviving old threads...there's so many old threads that many new guys never even see the old stuff.

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## Thesslian

Fear my powers of threadomancy!  Neat tutorial.  I managed to knock this out today.  I think I screwed up the trees, but I think that maybe a signature thing for me.  I learned a few things that photoshop could do that I didn't know.  I didn't know you could get an action to do this much of the work.  Can actions be shared like brushes and such?

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## ScotlandTom

Well if it weren't for your threadomancy, Thesslian, I wouldn't have discovered this tutorial.  Thank you for your dark powers!

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## wildharmonic

Wow, this seriously just blew my mind. Thank you so much!

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## Ogulrok

Ive automated the process of making this kind of maps... im waiting on my post to be "approved" and i'll link it here

Big thx for this tutorial... thats a great and easy process for on the fly towns designs.

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## Thrizian

Is there a reason to use 100 PPI? If the end result is to be used on any digital/screen related media it's best to use 72ppi since that's the maximum screen resolution.

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## waldronate

> Is there a reason to use 100 PPI? If the end result is to be used on any digital/screen related media it's best to use 72ppi since that's the maximum screen resolution.


72 dpi was a good number back when the fishtank Mac was king and the goal was to have each black and white dot on the screen correspond to one black and white dot on the dot-matrix printer. A typical Windows screen is ballpark 100ppi for a basic 1920x1080 24" monitor and goes to well above 300ppi on smaller 4k monitors.

For the purposes of this tutorial, though, the dpi is irrelevant.

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## jslaw06

Hi, just thought I'd add a map I created using ideas from the tutorial. A different end style, but the random generation of buildings is awesome. Thanks for the tutorial.

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## ChickPea

That looks great. Well done!  :Smile:

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