I always look at the custom maps for boards I'm considering joining! Super helpful for me to get a sense of the world I'm playing in and everything.

I made my own map. I hand drew the thing, had someone outline it for me (I didn’t have a tablet at the time), and colored and textured the dang thing with Gimp. Since I have an original world as my setting I’ve found it’s pretty helpful for some players to get their characters’ bearings. 🙂

Well now I feel like an absolute maniac for drawing my own maps lol I've got a stash of weird blob-like images saved that I haphazardly stitch together in Photoshop to give myself a rough shape, then I break out the art tablet to overpaint/refine the shape, blob in and then refine land features/regions, then add all the symbols/markers and legends. Its a bit of work, and loads of clipping masks and going over things 60 million times, but I'm really finicky on the aesthetic of visual aids for my boards and low key hate the end results of a lot of the map generators I've tried out.

I'd really like to show you guys my work ! I am a digital artist by trade and paint peoples pets for living (Or, a few times I have even painted my character's pets) but I also have a little hobby in colourizing and repurposing public domain paintings. This essentially means taking something old and making it new. This is how I made graphics for my site, and I am asked almost twice a day where I got my site's header - I am here to tell you where! Restoration is a process almost all old paintings will eventually go through, but restoration and reconstruction of a single painting takes a professional (usually someone who has extensively studied art history + restoration and works for a museum or a university) weeks or even months depending on the damage. Very often these works are trapped beneath over centuries of old varnish which leaves them looking discoloured and not at all how the original artist envisioned them. Thankfully photoshop can bring life back to them without touching the original piece (let us not forget the botched "restoration" of Ecce Homo) My site's header image is a colourized version of a very old, very discoloured piece curated by the Rijksmuseum in Holland - we, the internet, are very lucky to have access to their collections through the public domain and free use at Rijksstudio, though! BEFORE YOU USE AN IMAGE FROM RIJKSTUDIO, or any site that offers to provide you with images, please check the lisence - either Public Domain, Personal Use, or Attribution lisences - public domain is best, though. If you are interested in learning how to do this yourself I would be happy to create a tutorial on colourisation, or also explain image licencing and the various lisences so you can learn about which images you can use and build upon freely without breaching copyrights - Consider this post an expression of interest! http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.7521 - scroll for object data of this piece incl. lisence https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en - Image licence of the ORIGINAL (not of the colourized piece which belongs to me.) The Original: Boslandschap bij maanlicht by Georg Eduard Otto Saal, 1861 (Public domain, no copyright) My Colorized version: (This belongs to me)

There are lots of great photoshop map brushes you can get on DeviantART (just credit ofc!) to create mountains, forests, rivers, towns etc. This map looks brilliant! Another program I used a long time ago was called Inkarnate or something of a similar name, though I believe was in beta back then. It may have changed an awful lot.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC20VXGMJPOBEhXZhAv29cNQ/videos?disable_polymer=1 Avant Novis has some cool mapmaking things. I think they most use artrage.

wanted to drop a couple of links here as additional resources that folks might be interested in. i like creating my own maps from scratch in Clip Studio or Photoshop, buuut for those who don't have a specific vision for their world map and just want to generate a map as a base and then plug in their location names onto that generated map, i recommend these two map generators: Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator: For world maps Watabou's Fantasy City Generator: For city maps

This topic's responses inspired me to create a coterie dedicated to World Building. It's an open to join coterie for discussing all aspects of world building from forum layout to map design. We can also upload and give tips and tricks on map building (a new love of mine). World Building Coterie

I'd suggest watching some of the tutorials on YouTube. If you do a search on Wonderdraft, lots of videos pop up. And thank you!

That is an incredible looking map. I'm going to have to check that out! And as long as it's a one time purchase, that's more manageable on my budgets than a month subscription.

Thanks for the feedback! I discovered Inkarnate and love it for smaller, very detailed maps - like villages or cities. I also found Wonderdraft and it is amazing! There is a one-time purchase price of $29.99 US. I usually do like 99% of my work in Wonderdraft. I have done layout in Photoshop if I wanted to combine more than one landmass. Pros (so far) Excellent for large scale maps. Has a built-in landmass generator that you can tweak to your liking. Works great with graphic drawing tablets (I have an XP-Pen Artist 12) Several themes and options. Can "zoom" a section to create a detailed map - like a specific town or terrain. Easy to "paint" and blend biomes, etc. Hundreds of symbols and icons. Labels, grids, overlays, etc. Can import and trace landmasses, etc. (I use Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator for pure landmasses). Several tutorials on YouTube. Can import and export maps. I think you can import your own symbols (castles, houses, critters). Cons (so far) Low grade user interface (at least on the Mac). Not quite as intuitive as Inkarnate. However, the tutorials are excellent. I am sure there are more cons, but those are the 2 biggies. Here is the landmass I'm working on currently. I used Photoshop to layout and combine several landmasses into the layout I wanted, then imported it to Wonderdraft and traced the images. Doing it this way is time consuming. However, that was the only way to get the western landmass layout that I wanted. Right now it is a bare landmass. I've not started adding mountains, rivers, other terrain, etc. Since I'm about half-blind, I'm building my maps in segments - Western Hemisphere (the one below), Eastern Hemisphere (Laid out but not imported yet), and then any additional major islands we might need. This map was done on the 4K Ultra theme in Wonderdraft (3940X2160) and uses the "pastel" setting for the ocean color.

I also use Inkarnate. It makes decent maps. I used it for my fantasy site and enjoyed it. And as mentioned it’s very easy to go in and edit in new locations.

I've used Inkarnate in the past. It's relatively simple to use. Tricky part is actually getting it to work with large scale maps, since it's more designed for smaller resolutions. But it's fairly easy to go back in and edit the maps as they develop.

Ooh, going back to monochrome is a good idea. I usually start out with monochrome when I'm doing digital painting to get the values more or less in the right range, but I hadn't thought of doing it afterwards/for a theme. Yeah, what our brains do with color is... sort of endlessly fascinating. (And then there's the whole "do purple and magenta even exist?" quandary.)

I do, yes, take a screen-cap of my themes and make everything black and white via Photoshop filter, and then adjust problematic colours. If I can't see it in black and white, then users probably also can't see it if they perceive that colour differently. It's a decent sweep-check for most colourblindness types. The thing with colour associations is that I think it's all perception anyway, as many people get different feelings from the same colours, and longer exposure times to it can also change how one perceives that colour. For instance, many people find black to be empowering and mysterious, but many others find it scary and imposing. Yellow is perky and energising, but over a long period of time can cause anxiety and tenseness. It's about balancing colours so that they don't overload over time. And the same people can perceive the same colours differently depending on how their life is going at the time and what mood they're in. It's really both an objective and subjective thing at once, so I think relying too much on either method isn't good, because both have a place and merit. It's good to have a science-backed place to start, but don't ignore your gut, either. c:

I think @Arceus also does the black and white test for color contrast.

That's a really good point. (Also everything you said about designing with differences in vision in mind is 💯) I've studied basic color theory, but I tend to be a little more on the... intuitive? end? when it comes to what colors I think give me a certain mood. I also tend to do what Morrigan said and start with my header/background/main graphic and pull colors from there. I don't always refer back to actual color theory, but maybe I should start doing that more. And that doesn't sound like taking it too seriously - that just sounds like best practices for a designer to me!

It depends on the site I'm making it for, because what colours I use depends on the site environment and mood. If there's something tense going on in the overall plot, I may go with purples or reds. If it's cheerier, I may go with golds or brown. Mostly I'll start with the base colours and these are always charcoals or silvers, and that's my main tone. Most of the rest spawn off that one, so I've got like four different shades of dark grey depending on my needs, and then I toss in splashes of colour. I don't overload colour, because I aim to create themes that are visible enough regardless of the vision capabilities, or incapabilities, of the viewer. So we have strong contrasts and if I use commonly problematic colours like red, it's a wildly different shade than the dark greys or silvers it exists around so that viewers that are colourblind can see it. I create themes for sites, for ideas and concepts, rather than as standalone designs. Because I feel like the site theme and overall UX design can make or break a site, like that is the first thing people are going to see and interact with, and the idea is to tie it into the game and make it as immersive as the rest, to make the way the navigation and layout elements connect feel like an extension of the site's overall environment. The idea is smooth flow, colours that work together and probably evoke some sort of a feeling (I have studied and restudied colour theory and how colours affect mood and temperament over and over and over to nail this down, so no I'm not just throwing colours together, there's a reason for every shade I choose), with good contrast and visibility. So when I make a theme that isn't for a specific site I think, Hmm, what kind of feeling do I want to impress with this theme? What ideas am I trying to evoke? And then I decide what colours go best with that goal. I know I take this way too seriously, but also I sell my themes, and tbh it was my biggest money-maker for four years, so I guess it makes sense. lol

I normally base my theme on my header as that's what makes everything cohesive. The header is often what I would spend the most time on so that I can develop the colors based on that. If I'm just making a theme I normally use https://www.colourlovers.com/ to get a palette base before I add and adjust to my liking, or http://paletton.com

For anyone who does any kind of modification to their themes: how do you figure out what color scheme you want? Do you go into things with an idea of "I want warm/cool/pastel/dark colors"? Or do you just play around with things until something looks right? If you use a palette generator, what do you use? It really depends on what I'm doing, for me. Sometimes I have a really good idea of what my theme/colors are going to be, and I'll make swatches (with hex codes) so I can grab the colors easily. Sometimes I start with the background image and figure out a palette from there. The thing I'm currently working on, though... I have no idea what to do. Light? Dark? Low contrast? Unsaturated? Who knows. For making palettes, I usually either use Paletton or just make something in Photoshop.