The Lands of Ice and Fire

It’s official! I am working on the maps for A Song of Ice and Fire by George RR Martin. The image above is an early mockup of the cover and the full map folio is due to come out in October of this year. Now obviously I can’t say too much about the project, but here’s the description from the product page:

George R. R. Martin’s beloved Song of Ice and Fire series, which started with A Game of Thrones, is bursting with a variety and richness of landscapes—from bitter tundra to arid wasteland and everything in between—that provide a sense of scale unrivaled in contemporary fantasy. Now this dazzling set of maps, featuring original artwork from illustrator and cartographer Jonathan Roberts, transforms Martin’s epic saga into a world as fully realized as the one around us.

How To Draw Forests

The dark and foreboding wood is a staple of fantasy literature and our own folklore. The Forest looms large in the Grimm Tales – an enemy in its own right. Mirkwood, Fangorn and the Old Forest all harbour ancient powers and perils for the characters of Middle Earth. Without Sherwood forest, Robin Hood would be just another outlaw. Forests are the Wild Other in many stories, acting as borders, sources of mystery and sources of resources and are key to any world map.

Here I’ve shown two types of forest, coniferous and deciduous, and I’m working in 3/4 view as before.

A Note on Background Textures

This is less a tutorial, and more a note following last week’s post on drawing grasslands. The result of that tutorial strongly depend upon the background texture used and I wanted to highlight that with this post.

The World of Ilkor: Dark Rising

In 2011 I was commissioned to create a map of the world of Ilkor for the browser game Ilkor: Dark Rising. The brief was to use a style inspired by the classic Middle Earth maps. Recently GAD Games have released a few of the detail views that I did for them so I get to show them off! I’ll have to wait a little for the full world map to be released, but for now, here’s the detail views:

How to Draw Grassland

Grasslands are tricky to map. They’re large empty open expanses. But if you just flood fill an area with light green it’ll stand out like a sore thumb against your beautifully rendered mountains and lovingly painted rivers and forests. The colour is tough too – you want it to be a light green without being fluorescent.

I’ve found that the following works well for grasslands:

Lunchtime Tips: Blend Modes

Blend modes are a wonderful feature of Photoshop, and also appear in many other programs, including Gimp. Here’s a few I use regularly. I’ve taken the same styles o text and shown how they appear using the different blend modes. Further down, you can see the effect of using a selection of different gradients and setting them to the relevant blend mode. There’s a breakdown of each blend mode after the jump.

How to draw isometric cliffs

Following my quick run down of how to draw cliffs  here’s an equally quick one for drawing cliffs on isometric maps.