How to Create a Settlement Map December 23, 2019 Randy Ellefson Previous Next Decide what the settlement’s water supplies are (lake, river, wells?) and draw this on a map, whether with pencil and paper or a program like City Designer 3 from Pro Fantasy. Then choose an area as “old town,” which is where the settlement began before spreading out.
Making a Fantasy Map: Settlements
If you want to learn how to make a map in more detail—or you’d like to make one but can’t due to Affinity’s pricetag—then take a look at my new eBook: How to Make a Fantasy Map: A Writer’s Guide to Otherworldly Cartography.
Vector Graphics
If you’ve not read my other tutorials, you should know that this series deals with how to create a fantasy map using vector graphics. If you’re used to working in tools like Microsoft Paint then it may take a bit of adjustment before you’re comfortable with this medium.
Step 1 – Draw Icons
For your map, you may want to draw detailed illustrations of each town and city. For this tutorial, however, we’ll focus on some basic icons that will represent your settlements: towns, cities, castles, and so on. You can draw these icons any way you like, but I’m going to make them quite simple for this tutorial.
Step 2 – Add Them To Your Map
The next step is very simple; just copy your icons over to your map document and start putting them where you want them. I’ve just thrown my icons in haphazardly, but if you’re writing a story you should think about where your settlements will go.
Step 3 – Draw Roads
Once you’ve got all the settlements done, it’s time to start drawing roads between them. You can decide on a style for your own roads, but I’ll just use a dotted line to keep things simple. Just draw a line from one settlement to another. Then draw a new road to another settlement and so on.
Done!
If you’ve been following along with these tutorials and also adding your own flourishes to your map, then chances are you’re almost done. It might be a good idea to go back and add in anything you might have accidentally missed; I forgot the river deltas on this map, for instance. The vector medium will let you fix these mistakes with ease.
Why do maps help people?
Secondly, maps help people to navigate. How would you feel being thrown into outer Mongolia (assuming you don’t live there) with no iPhone, map or directions of any kind? Lost… confused… scared? So imagine how your reader feels when you throw them straight into your novel with no guiding map to help them find their bearings.
What layer of a map adds more color?
The sea layer is where you start adding more colour to the map. Up until now your map has consisted of green and white gradients but with the sea and coastline you’ll now add a fresh blue into the mix.
Why do we use maps in books?
Maps provide a solid, visual way to show people your world. In the quick glance of a map your readers will have taken in more of your world than you could show them in a full chapter of your novel.
Why are settlement maps important?
However, settlement maps help ground population counts. They provide context and color to a number of other data. For example, settlement information is: Foundational to census enumeration. Census managers must know where people live in order to efficiently plan where to go.
What is settlement data?
Settlement data (including points, names, and extents) characterise the environments in which humans live. They provide vital information about communities such as name, buildings distribution, and geographic extent. GRID3 locates settlements so that all people, whether they live in farmland, suburbs, or cities, are visible to policy makers, critical service providers, and other stakeholders.
Why is accurate mapping important?
Accurately mapping and naming settlements enables tracking and monitoring the progress of activities/interventions/programmes, etc. in critical sectors such as agriculture, health, and education.
Can you be ineffective without settlement locations?
Without settlement locations, place names, and extents, your interventions may be ineffective . This is true not only of emergencies like natural disasters, but of all government and humanitarian planning.
Who is the artist behind the maps in the Realm Rift Saga?
Given my complete lack of artistic skills, I turned to Howard Coates, the artist behind the maps in the Realm Rift Saga books, for his advice on how to hand draw a fantasy map.
What happens when a river enters a high terrain area?
They’ll tumble and meander around hills, rises, through canyons and crevasses. If the river enters and area with high terrain on all sides, it might form a lake. land gets flat and open with high terrain on all sides, they might form lakes. Rivers can go underground too; whatever gets them down faster.
What is fantasy map?
Drawing a fantasy map is an act of creation. Some people wonder whether world-building or plot comes first; the truth is that you’ll probably get the best results if you let both grow together. So let all those facts about geography sit at the back of your mind and let your pencil go where it will.
What is the name of the area of land with high terrain on all sides?
Lakes are areas of land with high terrain on all sides, and are generally fed by rivers or rainfall. The water will usually find an escape route and form a new river to join the ocean.
Why do people build cities?
If you’re about to put a city onto your map, think about why it’s there. Is it near a water source? People need water, and they won’t want to travel far to get it (because that’s inconvenient). Unless, of course, there’s another reason to build there. Perhaps there’s a natural resource nearby? People won’t want to slog miles to get to a mine, so there’s a reason to build a town around the mine and send someone to fetch water for everyone.
Do statesmen think about natural borders?
Most statesmen won’t think about natural borders; they’ll carve up the land in straight lines that are easy to draw. A lot of the problems we have in the modern world have their root in the straight lines drawn through cultures and people by a bunch of people stood around a map. It’s awful in the real world.
Do fantasy authors like maps?
If you’ve read more than a handful of fantasy books, you can easily deduce that fantasy authors love maps. We assume that fantasy readers love maps too, which is why we keep putting maps in our books. I think it’s a safe assumption but, if it isn’t, fantasy maps are here to stay anyway; of the top 25 fantasy books, almost half have maps. (Truth be told, I’d expected more!) But, if you’re not a professional cartographer, drawing an entire world can be daunting. So I’ve put together some hints, tips, ideas and tools that will help the fantasy author, Dungeon Master, or anyone else to draw their own fantasy maps.
When drawing maps, do you need to think about the balance between making the map easy to understand?
Always when drawing maps, you need to think about the balance between making the map easy to understand, and making it realistic or pretty. The doors on my map are obviously exaggerated, but I want to make it clear to whoever is looking at the map where the doors are, since that’s critical information (and to be honest, I think it looks fine).
How to draw a village?
Start by drawing the rough outlines of your village with a mechanical pencil. In this case, I’m just drawing a small cluster of houses, but if you’re going for a larger village or town, you might want to put some though into if there should be any main roads, village squares or winding alleys you want to include.
What to do with 0.05 marker?
With a 0.05 marker, add finer details, such as roof tiles, wood texture to porches, crates and barrels. Also, since this is a lakeside settlement, I add some wavy lines to the coastline.
How to draw a thatched roof?
Start by placing the tip of the pen on the ridge, and then draw a quick line towards the edge of the roof. As you move the pen towards the edge of the roof, apply less pressure to make the line thinner at the end. This might need a little bit of practise, so do that on a separate paper. Alternatively, you can skip this technique and just draw normal lines of varying length — that will also look good.
Why are villages important?
Villages and towns are important places in most fantasy roleplaying games. It’s a place for the adventurers to stock-up on gear before taking off on wilderness or dungeon expeditions, interact with NPC’s, and sometimes the village itself is the main stage of the adventure.
