How to Create Political Maps | Inkarnate Stream

and we're live happy monday everybody it's the beginning of the week but at least we're spending it together it's live stream time and today we're gonna be making political maps i'm super stoked about this political maps are super fun to make they're cool and they're useful um and they can really just add a little bit of flavor to your campaign so it's always nice to add a little extra fun map in there hey hd white i would i welcome glad to have you here welcome welcome awesome so political maps are on the agenda today super exciting now for those of you who have their own world maps you should go ahead and kind of make a clone of a map that you would like to make political so if you have a map in the world that's fantasy world parchment world fantasy regional and you want to turn that map into a political map your world map into a political map go ahead and clone that map right now clone it and then open it up and you can follow along if you don't have a map that you would like to do try doing political maps following along you can go ahead and just clone and edit this map i'll copy the link and put it in the chat so if you want to follow along clone this map all right i'll go ahead and put that in the chat there you are so go ahead and um clone and edit that map if you want to follow along with this particular map if you have your own that's fine just go ahead and clone that okay so go ahead and set that up i'm going to go ahead and open this up real quick i'm going to edit the map hey king clown your royal majesty welcome it's nice to have you here with us today okay political math time yeah i'm going to open up this map that we've kind of used in past streams i'm just gonna wait for a few moments to people filter in and i want people to um be able to follow along so again clone the map in the map link that i provided to you in the chat or clone one of your own world maps and then save it and re-label it political map and we'll show you how to actually make political maps from uh your actual map so it's up to you okay all right so i've used this map we used it in a previous stream some fun names in there we all got a giggle for everyone was here blunder hills fingers hub some fun names in here but we're going to turn this into a political map all right so one of the first things that you you want to do is is to select every single thing on the map and just group it and then you're going to um you're going to rename it and just click this little rename group it's a pencil icon and just call it everything okay so now that you've grouped every single thing on your map and you've labeled it everything looks like i got 9694 objects in this group and you've labeled it now um what you're going to want to do is to paint for me i'm going to there's a couple options here if you're already working with a map and you want to designate the lines and you want to probably not make this group completely invisible because you might want to use them as a guide to determine where your where your countries are and so once you've grouped everything you can uh drop the opacity on it so you can go over to your opacity slider bar and bring it down quite a bit there you go and you have the opacity all the way down and so all the everything is still there but it's obviously been dropped the opacity has been dropped in that group and it kind of looks interesting too right it's kind of faded out now you might want to also delete all your text for sure you're going to want to do that let's go back in that group if you go open the group then go to edit group click all to turn everything off and then text you can now select everything in the text and you can just delete it i'm going to delete all my text because i don't need all the text because what i want is my political names and stuff to be on there all right now for those of you who don't know what a political map is a political map is just designate certain um areas that are controlled like nation-states countries it could be an empire which is a collection of nation states like controlled by you know a major figurehead it could be a republic it could be you know some form of a democracy but whatever it is your political map is designed to show uh the boundaries of those nation states or empires or whatever and also you want to show things like uh the capital city and maybe some notable large cities now what exactly if you're wondering like what what do you use like how do you know what to do with your political map and that can be confusing but i mean the political map is just to show again the various nation states the governing bodies that um that control those territories and stuff like that i'm also going to go in and remove all this landscape right here i'm just going to go in with my add mode and the mass tool probably should have prepped that before but hey it happens right so go ahead and add this in and there are a couple ways that you can go about doing a political map the beauty of political maps is there's a lot of different styles that you can go about doing it i'm only going to show you one in this stream but don't limit yourself there's a lot of different ways to do this and it works with any map so i'm just gonna remove all this one of the things with political maps is you don't really need to show the geography or the political map because it's political you're showing political lines the boundaries these kind of things um you're not showing uh geography so you don't even need to have geography at all the only reason why i'm having to keep all your stamps and grouping them like this it's just in case you need them as a guide to determine where your boundaries are so that's basically that hey hey welcome nimrod glad you're here all right hope people are following along so i just really if you don't need this if you already know where all your political lines are you can just go ahead and delete delete everything you don't need to have it there or you can keep it because it's faded out like this the emphasis is on the borders instead but you can still faintly see um the geography in the background maybe that's that's cool with you too right because it does look interesting that it's kind of faded out the geography is still there but you don't have to do that too right you can just go ahead and just delete it all and you only want to maybe put focus on um particular things like you only want to put major focus on um the political boundaries and stuff and you don't want any geography at all so it's up to you lots of different ways to go about doing it looks like i am lagging a little bit forgive me all right oops a lot of lag must be because the map is in 3k oh wow it is just completely completely out all right well i'll have to go out sorry about that let's go ahead and open up sorry about that not sure what's going on there just bear with me while i open up just some serious lag here oops thank you for bearing with me folks we'll go back into the political map i'm going to edit it okay first time chat bob bobber the best q thank you i appreciate the understanding i'm glad it's only minimal i'm glad that you're here by the way first time chatter welcome welcome love when new folks new faces are in the chat i like it the more the merrier it's monday folks you know and if you're gonna have a monday enjoy it with people right with the cool people right so i'm just gonna select every single thing on the map i'm gonna delete it because i don't even need it not at all it's not important so just i'm just going to remove that okay let's go ahead and go in and i'll try to fix the add little mask tool i fill this in i don't want this here again you can keep your geography on your map just make sure that you drop the opacity or drop the contrast way down uh because it's parchment um with parchment maps even if you drop the opacity the clipping mask still show so if you're you're doing a fantasy regional or fantasy world style when you group everything make sure that you instead of uh dropping the opacity just bring down the contrast okay that's going to be in your advanced settings in the group settings or the advanced settings so i'll show you real quick let me put a couple together so if i have this stamp right here you'll notice that there is a setting in advanced settings called contrast and what it does is just completely kind of dulling out the line work and so that will also work just fine if you want to do it that way okay so up to you lots of different options hello lysanna welcome glad that you are here yes more new faces i absolutely love it fantastic okay all right now once you've done once you've kind of deleted everything or dropped the contrast or what opacity whatever your method is you're going to want to paint the entire map the landscape probably a brighter color and the reason why i recommend a bright white or an off eggshell white that kind of color is because your political boundaries are going to be colored right and so you want those to pop out if you've got a green background and you have a green political border political border is not going to pop out right so we're going to think about contrast when we're wanting to do that so there are a couple options about doing that there's this off color right here this color works just fine we can use this one oopsie that's a interesting fun little bug some spots right there i love it hey everybody i just wanted to showcase this to you oh yeah lots of people and yeah yeah i am here to make things super odd okay that's my job i'm i'm an awkward fellow what can i say all right so we're gonna save the map refresh i think that was just some miranda bug right there thank you for bearing with me appreciate it and um painter so paint all of your fg layer an off-white eggshell again because what we're going to do is we're going to use the path tool and the shadows of the path tool to create our borders and we're going to be flattening them as well all right all right just taking them out to load yeah that was just a weird buggy okay now let's talk about political boundaries okay so when it comes to political boundaries what i like to do first is set uh the first boundary which is going to be this dashed line okay that dashed line is going to represent that first boundary so one second while i drop the opacity and get the width that i want when working with a path tool just put a path down first and then you can deal with it live so we'll go down like this there we go so now i have that path that i want perfect i can delete now i'm going to go ahead and pick the boundaries now if you already have your your topography and it's set to a lower opacity or contrast make sure that you follow the lines around the topography where you want now most political borders are generally created by rivers mountain ranges natural formations that create an actual natural divide so most of your borders again are going to be along rivers and mountain ranges along the coastlines things like that is it great question right here let me ask this is it is it possible to create enclosed areas with color uh rather than just coloring the path border um actually i'm gonna be showing you a couple tricks so follow along rogue 13 and you will find out absolutely i promise you i will help you out okay so now again follow rivers mountain ranges coastlines all right now generally the size of your nation state somewhat is determined by what kind of government structure it is right so if you have an empire an empire is is a political organization groups that take over other nations and incorporate them into their own steal their natural resources and stuff like that so that's what an empire does so an empire would probably be a little bit larger than per se a small republic a democratic republic things like that so the size of your nation states and the size of maybe other formations is determined on what it is so again an empire would be much larger let's start with uh first in closing off the smaller sections so i have this really weird kind of horn right here it's called a horn and it's a nice shape you kind of have an inlet or a bay right here this works kind of nice and so i'm just going to make this horn right here its own nation state maybe we'll and i'll let people decide the titles of the nation states okay including the capitals and the cities i'll have you guys decide all that stuff so first i'm gonna now with making your borders if they are following a river or a mountain range you're going to expect the borders to not be straight lines right because a river is not a straight line right so when you're doing your political borders i recommend putting a little bit of meandering in it or a little bit of s-curves into it and i'll show you how i go about doing that so let's just assume that maybe there's a mountain range right here and we're gonna go in like this and add in maybe a sliver right here so you have this nice border right here now this is the first step we've made this section right here the first nation now you want to also decide the color of the nation that means what color you want to decide it to be so let's say i want this one to be red okay first things first you're going to change your path to a straight line you're going to pick a color and i recommend picking a color that's in um this palette right here so you'll never forget it or if you do use it make sure uh that you have it memorized and the information is right here the hex information rgba so whatever color you're using just in case you have to redo a section or whatever make sure you memorize the color information when you take a screenshot or write it down whatever it is make sure you remember that color information just in case because there's no favoriting a color in a pack you can do that with colors and textures with the paintbrush tool but you can't do that with paths okay so once you've done that you also want to include a red shadow so we're going to bring the blur out quite a bit all the way out i'm going to put one down real first just to see how uh the shadow looks let me go out all the way that was red shadow let me see here right about i think there let's go to blur as well now it's blurred make sure you blur it and let's increase um the shadow size let's go up a little bit more here that looks fine okay now that you've done that let's also increase the size there we go okay now that you've done that uh you can go line all the way around the political or around around the landscape like this okay so go around the landscape you can do it in a single stroke or multiple strokes it's up to you okay now if you're worried about the red line going over into the ocean don't worry about that we're to flatten it and i'll show you how that works okay so let's just keep going all the way around you can take a little break give your hand a rest for a second and just go back right where you left off and keep going you don't have to do it all in a single stroke okay let's say these islands are let's see let's undo that let's say these islands are also controlled by this republic so let's also put in those pads there we go and we're going to keep going all the way around and what's really nice is just use the land formation as your guide okay just follow the line all the way around go up this is this is the second step okay there you go all right okay stop right there now i'm gonna bring the width up all the way to five so it's nice and big i'm gonna go like this right across boom okay there's step one okay you've got your red boundary there next step is to paint in the whole thing red now i memorized the color it's this it just goes all the way into the corner i'm going to bring the softness all the way to zero and i'm going to drop the opacity to say let's say 30 okay and i'm going to bring the size down for a reason because i'm going to be painting in this whole section this color now this is going to have to be one stroke it's at 30 if you don't do this in one stroke let me give an example if i go like this and then this you'll notice that it crosses over okay so you have to do this part in a single stroke now if you don't want to do that um let me take a look does it look like you can hsbc uh colors so you'll have to just drop the the uh transparency to three or thirty and we're gonna paint in that whole section and in fact that's even too much let's bring it down to maybe let's go to 15 to see how that looks there we go perfect remember fill in the whole thing it's only this part you have to worry about because it will only be set to the fg layer okay let's fill in the whole thing remember one stroke don't let go fill in that whole section okay now that section is done okay now you're not gonna do any flattening until later okay because if you for flatten now and i was working on this other section i would paint over that path you're not gonna do any flattening until later so we're gonna do eat we're gonna do this to each section this technique for each one okay now that we've done that one let's create a larger empire let's create a much larger one oopsie i did not need to do that my mistake there we go i hope people can see the screen okay all right mistake all right let's take a look here all right um let's keep going here all right let's see that bar should not be showing there you fix that real quick once you're bearing with me okay now we've done that section let's go ahead and do that next one so again use that that dotted path it's right there just going to copy paste it i'm going to put it over here so that way i can select it i can select it and every time i select it i'll have that same path uh settings okay so let's create the larger empire now the larger empire can take up a large swath okay you could say that it takes up much of this land mass here it could even take up much of this horn uh this out bay here and much of this part right here and maybe there's just the sliver on this one right here belongs to another uh maybe nation state so let's do that okay now if you don't know which countries and nation states um if you don't know a couple if you don't know which nation states which countries to put into your political map it's not hard to figure out it's the ones that are going to have the most interaction with your players okay if it's just a side story if one of the nations is a side story or whatever you don't have to worry about putting in including that into the map okay so if you have a campaign and the most important part of the campaign is taking place in maybe these countries maybe these are the major players then those are the nations you're going to want to include okay if you have nations that are just maybe just there for backstory you don't have to include them in the map that's so it's really up to you hey philip i am so glad you're here okay let's go ahead and make that next political border i'm going to actually make this a horn right here belong to another nation state let's go ahead and do some crazy little loops and stuff right here let's say maybe there's a range there or a river or something like that so we'll put one there and then let's have a little bit more different shape one going here and then going up and i'm gonna not create this large uh section i'm gonna create this kind of wavy shapes we'll have it stop against there like that okay so this section right here is going to be our uh our empire and we can pick the color anyone have a preference on color purple green blue yellow excuse me burp color i mean anyone got a preference please let me know what color would this empire be threatening those poor like poor republic orange well i i i well when phil got their closest oh but now we're two with blue oh it's up to a vote now we've got blue blue blue oh it looks like blue sorry gwenfield next one will be orange okay i promise next one will be orange so we're going to stick with blue again with the paths i would just select the path that a red path and then put it down like this and now you can go in and change the color now if it's going to be blue remember to pick a blue that you remember all right so if i want i'm just going to go all the way into the corner that blue there and i'm going to go again click the blue that's in this um the pal the swatches go to the blue all the way in the corner blue and red is very basic but don't worry we're gonna throw an orange in there don't you worry my friend you will not be forgotten i promise all right so let's throw in our blue path here and just go along the edges just like this you can throw it you can even overlap uh the other side just make sure it doesn't go over the blue make sure it doesn't go over the red okay so you see that's got together now this is going to take a little bit longer because we have to fill in the whole section so we're going to go over the whole edge here and this is really as simple as the process gets i mean these first two steps are pretty simple stuff okay we'll get into the other steps shortly and we're also going to do a map frame because you want to know something if it's a political map i think a frame looks nice because sometimes it's hard to tell like when should i put a frame on my map right well i think the most obvious ones are like world maps uh political maps a cosmology map a planes map like there are magical planes um those kind of maps i would kind of expect to have a frame right because there's a little those maps are kind of the back story they tell some stories things like that so those are really the kind of maps that i'd like to put map frames on so we will be doing that but we'll do a map frame later i wanted to focus on the political part because that is indeed the strength in fact i think i'll push this all the way up to five the highest width there we go which is fine all right and we're gonna go all the way around and again just go right over the um the dashed path line there we go we'll take give the arm a rest for a second okay then go right back to it again now when it comes to like these little tiny islands and stuff you don't even have to worry about it don't don't worry about these little these little tiny islands that are lying around they're so small that the blue path will just envelop them and it's just going to end up looking blue so don't even bother with that just do the major sections okay and if there are sections of your map that aren't political uh then you can keep the geography um and that way you have some geography because sometimes with a map you want to have a little bit of everything you want geography plus political so let's say there's a section on the map that's not doesn't control by a nation-state a neutral zone like this section right here you could keep the geography on this island and don't put any political borders around it you could just say that this nation this island whatever is not involved in the overall conflicts or involved in the story of these protocol maps so that way you get to keep some of your geography uh as well so it's up to you how you want to go about doing that so let's just continue this we're almost there doing the blue that's right there we go keep going almost there yay this is the path that never ends all right i'm gonna stop right here for a sec there we go we're gonna continue going over this and then we will be ready to paint it in with that blue at ten percent okay there we go all right sweet now let's go in with zaboo all the way in there we go um to keep the pads uh group them differently for future editing um well i mean you're gonna end up flattening these because as you can see there's a red line going on the outside and me personally i don't care much for that red like if you're looking closely you'll see how it's red like that on the outside i don't care for that so i'll end up flattening this now if you don't if you want to keep it for future maps to change colors then i would just so just recommend um just making a clone of your like if you have maybe a storyboard where uh an empire joined like an empire takes over another nation state a nation state gains an alliance with another state or they merge to become a larger nation state then if you want to change the color of those paths yeah absolutely i would just clone the map uh and then have one clone that has the flattened paths and another one so it's up to you really maybe you even like the blue path or the blue or red on the outside me personally i don't so and that's just a matter of personal preference so let's go back let's i think 15 was it let me just double check yeah that works fine okay let's bring the size a little bit higher this time because it is fairly large space and remember do not let go so let's go ahead and fill this in if i can without going over i don't want to go into these other sections your eggs make it there we go sweet and so you know what's really nice about this is you have this dark blue or dark outline with a light color in the center so it really causes those borders to pop out and i really like that that looks really nice and we'll do more painting too because we're going to end up painting the center of these kind of that off eggshell white color as well then the reason why we're going to do that is so that the text that labels the nation state will pop out but we'll do that later let's keep with this okay oopsie i missed the spot just right there yikes oh no what a poo poo okay now i promised that there would be a orange and you know what we're gonna make it we're gonna make one that's decent size orange because i think it's just fair that we didn't do that so let's have orange right here and you could even say that this is uh an ally or could be even be the same the same country i don't really know up to you we can change them um you know you can have as many colors as you want as many nation states or countries as you like now i've already done the path that separates this from the other nation so that's great so i don't have to worry about doing that but i do want to select a path again and i probably want to change the color right so let's go with the orange let me just pull that down go up the color i'm going to pick the orange right from uh let's pick this let's pick this brighter orange i'm going to go all the way up corner here same thing here pick that orange right out of the palette bring it all the way up i think that one's a little bit darker there we go so now we have orange and we're gonna bring the width all the way up to five perfect okay or it's occupied by the empire you evil empires you're awesome okay next section you see we just keep going and this one's a little bit smaller so that's nice right now it's a little time consuming but hey it happens all right i mean you could just color in um just showing you one style just you know if you don't want to take the time to use the pads um then you don't have to use pads you can just paint in each one uh the color you want but i'm doing a technique i like because i personally like the um that the outline against the uh more opaque uh color in the center that's just my personal choice but if you wanted to you can just completely avoid the colored pads just do the dash pads and then just fill them in with whatever color you want okay and they don't have to be at a lower opacity there's so many different ways to do political maps i just wanted to show you the way that i like them but you can avoid if you don't have the time you don't want to do all the pads you don't have to it's up to you okay so just kind of keep that in mind that it's just up to you and how much time you have i know some of you might be private contractors and you're you know you're on a time frame you've got to get this map to a client within a couple of days or so you know it's it's all right just do the method that works best for you um you know just painting them a painting their colors with the dashed pads looks just fine you know it's not like it's not doable there are tons of political maps in real life where they're where they're just like that just plain colors um and there's no special outline or anything like that okay let's keep going we're almost there all right and again we're gonna want to paint in the center right so let's go back to this pick the orange color it should be at 15. let me just verify let's bring it up more that's pretty light let's go up a little bit more let's double that let's go with i think let's go 25 i think that should work just fine so now we're going to go in like this and remember just don't lift it don't take it off the page all right there we go i make sure i didn't miss a section up here i just the hair but it's okay all right is that a little too bright in comparison to the others i think it's okay let me just verify uh yeah i think no i think that's fine okay it almost looks more yellow than orange doesn't it that's right it's a reading body hey first time chatters tons of good people [Music] okay yeah it's yellow no i'm a silly butt now we need to get the orange in there don't worry we'll throw in an orange one right here let's go with a kind of a dark orange there we go there we go there we go why'd you do yellow for silly man [Laughter] well i will fix that don't you worry let's get the orange going shall we well what's going on here there we go that looks good to me let's also make that border orange as well let me i might have to increase the opacity did it is it still that same color let's bring the opacity up a little bit on this to really get it to be more orangish color i think awesome there we go political maps political maps td pod welcome political maps the way to go all right let's keep doing this let's do this corner do this little section here we'll do this main landmass and then i won't worry about the top parts because we've done the majority of it i'm going to show you the next sections because i could do because there's you could add so many so many so we're not going to worry about doing every single one so let's go in go around the edges here again you don't have to use the path tool you can totally just paint it in whatever freaking color you want you know just make it random spin the color wheel and just pick some random colors okay i'll go over here all right and we already have that orange color set up perfect all right there's that orange color let me apply it uh let me put it back down to 15 real quick let me just verify that's right whoa that is not 15 but that definitely pops out now doesn't it is there something different about this particular location let me just put one swipe down no we can bring it up i think a little bit more let's take it to a 17. yeah that works just fine ah so orange yeah we definitely want to be one there we go i did that yellow color it's like a little yellow snow section over there i goofed up there he wanted orange how did i screw that up naughty person super orange supercharged okay let's go ahead and save super orange yeah so that whole landmass now now does have um all the different nations the tang nation attacked i am here to serve i am a humble map making servant here to help you tis my occupation my fate hey phoenix curai could you also use a black or would it work as well with other colors uh could you you also use black sure you can of course you can it's probably called the gwen lands the orange one is the gwen lands don't worry we're gonna get to the labeling and i promise you we will put that in there okay and it's gonna be fun okay so part two so the first part was basically um doing your line work for all this stuff okay now the next step is to maybe throw in some regions okay now you don't have to do this but there's something called regions or provinces or if it's a country there might be states like a confederacy of some kind of different states uh it could be a single empire with no different states within it it could just be one consolidated land um without little tiny provinces so most large empires probably had provinces so you could create provincial governments um uh for administration for taxes um and things like that so most of the time there would be regions okay now if a country is super small you probably don't need to have a lot of regions in it but if you have like a nation state or a large country you're probably going to want to put in some regions now before i do regions let's do the labeling and i'm going to pick a text that i that i kind of like i'll pick lusitania for now and i'm going to make the text black or you can make it the color uh that you used in each one let's just do that let's just use uh the color used from each from each one let's first go with this one i believe gwenfield mentioned uh the gwenlins so let us do that now thank you very much all right throw it in okay let's make a little bit darker orange i think there we go i like that color a little bit better kind of a burnt orange there we go there's the gwen lens now when it comes to labeling um it it depends on how large the man the the um the space you have okay so if i go into spacing like this it'll get nice and long like that okay and now you can do curvature for each one if you want or you don't have to do curvatures it can be straight it's up to you so there's our gwen lin's anyone have a names please pick just say the color and then the name so if it's yellow call it this if it's red and do this so go ahead people in the chat and give me your names that you want for each nation state red blue and yellow the gwen lin's is already taken i'm afraid this controlled uh curve is cool yep the tangy army of the tangerine nation have the sharpest blades absolutely rogue 13. i absolutely agree they sharpen their their their blades on their teeth they're such bad butts oh yeah called the blue the halavian empire oh i dig that baba the best q i agree that is a good one i'm keeping that now i'm just gonna go ahead and copy and paste that right in there i like that name by the way so wheat so we'll go ahead and add that in there nice good call by the way all right let's throw in some text here uh let's throw it in a b there we have an empire nice great choice by the way oh the yellow is the mirror oh i like that name good one okay halvarian empire okay now uh double lines okay if you have a uh an empire um you might want to consider doing um if you have two lines of text like i have there in empire you can make it two lines of text you could make it one line of text if you're going to do two lines of text i recommend maybe including increasing the line height so that it will take up more space uh increasing the spacing um and that way it kind of fits larger it fits a little bit more into the major space there like that so we can go ahead and keep that gwen lens the halvarian empire i'm not going to curve it it's so big that i don't think curving is needed but the space inside this one is so small totally do that oh the red in karn states let's go ahead and do the mirror good choice by the way i like that tv pod let's go ahead and do that the mia okay and we'll go ahead and pick in a darker kind of yellow kind of a mustardy this is a kind of a gray color you know it's a grey poupon it is the grey poupon country known for making known for their delicious ripe bananas which have been fertilized by bat guano okay let's do this maybe increase the spacing a little bit more to fit more of the space um you can uh go all the way like this um like that or you can do it straight across like this it's up to you the objective is to get it to cover uh the majority of uh the space so maybe we can increase the spacing a little bit and maybe just do a little bit of curve going this way just a hair there we go yeah now if you if you prefer it to be so it's a little bit more readable because if it's at an angle like this you know you might have to like turn your head and be like well that is near right it's up to you how you want to label it me personally i don't mind that it's uh it's kind of at an angle like this that's not a big deal for me okay i will also angle this just a hair as well because all of these seem to be at weird angles so it's kind of odd if this one is at a perfect you know zero degrees right so it kind of makes sense to rotate it just a little bit so that way there's some continuity in the text right so that part let's go ahead and do the red we're going to call it the incarn states great one i me like me like and con states there we go and we can probably bring the line height down a little bit because uh it's not much space to work with so let's go with the red let's do that okay perfect in common states and we should bring the spacing down well um shoot that's a super tight squeeze let me try going there we go that works just fine let's take a look at what we've done so far right so we've got the halvarian empire zaguens mia and the incarnate states perfect i know it's only been 17 changes but i'm just going to say okay now once you've labeled now that you've done that we're going to keep going now the income statement is ruled by the tyrant named mitta or an acronym for mati [Laughter] i see through you nimrod what are you trying to say i'm not a dick well okay maybe i know am i yeah i am not authoritarian i'm just another cog in the machine okay all right so next step go ahead and select all your text okay and make sure the menus pop up let's go back text and select all the text here and i'm going to make all the shadows white oopsie that is the fun no i didn't mean to do that let me undo that real quick [Laughter] oh i love it dude awesome i just made them the wrong color ah sweet life is so good all right one second i'll fix this what did i do that far i'm big i have very big brain i'm just letting you know it's it's it's huge it's very big very big big big big big brand just watching all right sorry shadows that's where it says shadow right there okay we're gonna make it white and we're gonna bring the blur out let me go ahead and zoom in real quick and the reason why i'm doing this is because i want to have my letters pop out a little bit right so that shadow is going to be white and you you can even include a little bit of an outline if you wanted to you could make it white like this and then bring down uh the opacity to give it that extra bit of pop okay alvarian empire carton states perfect there we go now we're going to take that off white color uh that we use that's this color right here this off-white color and we're going to bring the opacity to around 25 let me just verify that real quick yep okay that works fine 25 and then bring the softness all the way up let's bring the size to where it can fit over it the entire text okay first things first don't we're going to play a little bit of the game operation okay in operation you don't touch any of the edges otherwise you get a okay so now this is the part that requires the hands of a surgeon someone with incredible stability in their hand okay must have the constitution for this all right so anyone likes that operation game the objective do not touch the edge of your borders what we're trying to do is fill in the center part of it to create a bit more fade so we'll do one pass will go in like this this is the first pass okay just don't let go go over it like this make sure you fill it in okay there we go it looks nice let's go ahead and do it again let's put another one right here so you have some nice bright white in there and then let's bring down the opacity a little more and go over this section okay there we go all right let's take a step back i just want to make sure that these where the text is that's where the most white or that off-white is going to be don't want it to be perfectly 100 okay all right okay so that's the first that's the step right you're just trying to create a bit even more transition so the dark blue line here to the light opaque blue all the way into the white okay with the colored text going in and you can just make it black if you want instead of colored it's up to you when it comes to color schemes i will tell you that i like to try to keep with the stroke color so if my stroke color is black like this then consider the text maybe being uh black okay now you don't have to do that that's up to you but see if i make it black now it really pops out and it sticks with the black of the stroke line see how the stroke line is black it matches with this okay now you don't have to do that okay me personally i prefer black over it but i just wanted to show you that there are different ways so many different ways to go about doing it okay listen man sturgeons don't have hands they have flippers okay they have fins i love it that's right hey man you gotta have that surgical precision okay i love that i i have a bit of a crowd here that has a sense of humor i love that so now you're just going to do the same thing to every single one of them so fill in the white like this and again it's just where the text is where you're going to have the most of that off shell white okay we're going to do that to every single nation state he did it to the empire so let's go ahead and do it to the gwenlins i'm gonna go right over the text like this go over it again there we go get that nice bring the size down because i need to fit inside this section right here there we go okay now you have a little bit of white there let's go and move the next one see look at that it looks so nice really looks like it pops out now and i really really like that okay so let's go in and do this last section right here i mean likes the pop okay i like the pop i can't help it the pop is nice super cool thank you nimrod i appreciate it you are too kind my good friend by the way namrod i've been loving your your recent stuff those map frames that city map was just gorgeous by the way i love it well done bravo bravo everyone's just been doing so good so many dang good maps lately battle maps parchment world just so many dang good maps out there i've just been so happy to see everyone's just incredible work so just a shout out to our incredible community hey the master bryant marshall has arrived your majesty welcome sir it is what how you come here to join us plebs in the map making process wait where are we at 23 changes we can probably save it's always best to save oh yeah license right agreed just incredible those map frames are just just the creme de la creme tell you right now i think i peed a little when i saw it first saw that mat i was like oh my goodness that was so beautiful oh god couldn't contain it all right so we're gonna save and then we're gonna move on to the next step we're gonna do those regions okay sweet sweet sweet keep going keep going all right sweetums all right okay so now you have that part done okay so next we're gonna go ahead and create maybe a couple regions all right and you can label regions you can um not give them a label it just depends on the spacing and what you want to show okay so let's let's do a little bit of regions let's start with an empire it's a larger space so let's go with that okay and you don't have to do those colored outlines anymore as long as it's well as long as it's within that specific nation state then you don't have to worry about coloring the borders anymore okay i mean you can if you want if it's individual states with their own state autonomy or provincial governments and they you know maybe work outside of the larger either a federal or imperial system sure but for me you don't really have to do that so again when it comes to regions just like your nation boundaries they're gonna follow mountain ranges rivers other other natural formations that act as a natural divides between sections okay so exactly the same thing let's say that we just want this little horn right here to be its own region so i'll go in like this with the wrong path hey just do as i do do as i say but not as i do okay i love that let's go in like this i'm just gonna have this be it's like a sliver have this section be its own little section so there's this nice region here let's go ahead and add another region let's say this one goes this is a fairly large one now when it comes to region lines don't have them go below any text that you have so if i go like this you're going to notice that the path goes underneath the text now that can be kind of confusing i don't actually care for that so instead what i recommend is just having the path go stop right there at the text and then continue on this way and the reason why i do that is because it won't um it won't have another dark line that's conflicting with the dark lines of the text right so it's just a way to make it easier for your eye okay so now we've done region one region two let's maybe make this entire section right here a region so maybe we'll go down like this and go up and say that this is a region actually i don't care for that shape that looks gooey i'm not going to have none of that naughty now okay let's make a little tiny region right here so you have a tiny little region right here well um right now we're reaching about 2 000 times i said i love it does anybody want to keep track of how many times matias said the word path love it okay let's keep going there's a question here what's this uh interesting do you sell maps or can i order maps um you know you can join our discord server and there is actual a channel that uh that does uh requests i personally don't do requests myself anymore so that's not part of my my job description anymore and but believe me there's so many good artists out there you can go to the incarnate discord join go to uh map requests go in there or no i think it's i can't remember the name of the channel i'm sure philip or someone else will require the link but go there pick the artist that you you like and get in contact with them and they will help you i guarantee you there are a lot of good mappers out there so sorry i don't currently do them myself feel bad about that but it's just the case currently so let's keep going i'm going to keep continuing making more and more sections i'm going to try not to make them too small because the smaller the section the less detail you can put in them so i'll only make a couple small ones let's maybe make one make a region that's in the heart of it so you have a nice big region here and a big region here okay now i'm going to go ahead and do these to all of them so let's maybe have another region in muir it's this whole section right here and then this other section can be right here we'll have this be a region as well okay and then the rest can be a much larger region down at the bottom the gwen lens is super small so i'm not going to worry about adding any larger regions this one is kind of small as well so i can maybe throw in a small region just a small one like this there we go okay uh right okay so now let's take a look and see how it looks so far so you can see now that there are these region lines if you're wondering why there's a random uh little thingy right here i'm not saying the word nimrod from now on i'm gonna call these window curtains okay you're gonna take your window curtains and i'm just leaving the window curtain up here at the side so that the next time you select the window curtain you'll have the same properties of that window curtain okay okay now we've added in all our regions now you can label each region if you want you can label just important regions yes the curtain empire the empire of lovely folds and drapery it's our major import i'm just export i'm just letting you know all right let's push this window curtain to the side so it doesn't get in the way of the other window curtains all right all right so now i'm going to go ahead and grab the text and what i'm going to do is to distinguish a region from the nation state i'm going to bring the opacity down quite a bit so if i bring the opacity down and i'm also going to bring the size down and remove the outline okay i'm going to bring back all the settings to the regular settings now if people want to come up with region names that'd be great okay so there's a couple regions let's look at them all one two three four five six there are six blue regions if people want to come up with regional names that's fine i can come up with some goofy goofiness because you guys all know that i can't take anything seriously for more than about well about 10 seconds so [Music] can't be helped folks so feel free come up with some names for these regions be funny nothing too inappropriate but inappropriate enough to be funny okay so you're going to label each section and for now i'm just going to put a question mark in each section and while people come up with names uh we'll go ahead and uh fill those in so please come up with some regional names i'd love that because i'm lazy and i want you to do the work for me okay do it do the work for me right now why why would i want to do it i'm a dictator remember the dictator makes everyone else do all zouave okay so come up with the names all right let's put a question mark in each region there we go there we go okay okay oh yeah you like that yeah i like that too that is that is really the trick that i like um because again you know if the path is over it underneath it it's gonna it's gonna look weird and in fact i'm gonna do another one because you said that let's just add another one right here just for fun going through here because i do like that so it's another one right here there you go now it's not kind of going over it and we can add one more label right over here there we go okay so now you have uh the region names okay it looks so organic i know it's made of delicious fruits it's organic i love it okay so now we have um that so i'm going to come up with each each regions i'm just going to call this do do do do pants uh because uh there are no names so far so do your pants region uh and then um um exploitation let's hear more empire names oh let's call this one um not so happy place okay all right oh first hey first time chat half sec welcome hamlet that's a cool name i like him the lasanna state oh i like that too let's call this one lysanna yeah sweet i i'm cool with it we will call it by everyone's name by santa i believe this one was called hamlet okay sweet thank you everyone for your help with the names i appreciate it okay let's go ahead and squeeze this one in here like that so we can fit it in there get lysanna in there this larger section right here there we go grotto oh i get it grotel spooks grotto what a great name i like it let's do that spooked grotto okay all right all right here we go all right um do we have more left yeah we do we've got the hamlet which is not how you spell hamlet but hamlet sounds fun actually well i mean it is the curtain empire so i mean they're going to be doing hems right so of course it's hamlet right let's do it the marshall dynasty yes welcome to zamasu dynasty well let's do it marshall dynasty it is there we go the marshall dynasty and i might have to bring the size down just a pinky pinky pinky bit there because it's a bit too small there we go we've got hamlet which is actually hamlet again it is we're doing hems here it is the empire of curtains come on get with the program folks this is a small one so give it a small name maybe uh tiered i'm just gonna call it tiered okay i know it should have a u in it but hey you get the idea okay uh newer let's see here we'll come up with some more memes and monos it's a very manly very manly region just letting you know very my name i think manos means hand in latin is it manos yeah i think it means hand so zamambi mountains oh yeah but there's no mountains remember this is political map it's a region but i will call it the mumbi verse there we go zamambivas right there that's where that is oh mom mommy mommy first there we go now we're talking okay go up here well let's go with um uh elise it's gonna come up with some random names uh let's just call this one toe jam ah toe jam there we go this is at the toe gem stinky feet are found here okay how many do we have left oh there's one more right here let's call this uh dingy bop dinghy bob is the greatest uh region to live in i'm just letting you know property is uh pretty cheap right now in dingy mop nice place i mean you know tourist season is not so great but you know i mean not not a bad place you know okay dingy bob is done there we go all the empires ha everyone has the name doo doo pants lysanna hamlet or hamlet the gwen lens all right sweet where are we at 73 changes let's say okay all right so now that you've done regional sections you might want to consider maybe adding in some roads um some locations okay so what we're going to do is we're going to use icons to make the major cities and capitals okay so uh and we don't have to now when you're making a political map you don't have to add in every single city and village that's in that nation state or that region you just want to pick the most important city like you know large population maybe it's an important uh port that uh for commerce so knowing what cities to put on your political map really are is determined by their size and importance to the empire is it a major hub of religion if it's a theater evil theocracy um then you know is this where the capital is is this where um the major temple is is this where the priests live of this empire this theocratic empire so when you're thinking about those things that really determines what kind of locations to put on your map again you don't have to add geological formations it's a political map so you only need to think about politics so really the capital city and the major city the largest city that means by population okay in each region okay so let's go with that so there are a lot of different choices when it comes to making cities now there's parchment world and you'll see that there are these parchment stamps now they're brown very brown brown i'm not sure how you say it brown i kind of want black because i'm sticking with the same color you notice here that the text is black the line work is black the stroke is black okay so let's go with black so let's go into the catalog we're gonna go with fantasy world instead okay fantasy world has those little cool little icons okay so let's go down and there should be some icons just allow the art to load right here is perfect okay now it's up to you uh it's up to you oh uh yeah absolutely great one nemeron i love it fantasy world i love these so it's up to you how you want to uh do your villages now me personally a political map i don't really use uh these kind of structured icons where you have a dwarven city a human icons you can that's entirely up to you but me personally i actually prefer to use these markers instead and it's easier and you don't have to make a legend that's the beauty of it okay um if it's just two icons one represents a basic city and one represents a capital then you don't really need a legend it's already kind of obvious uh that this is a capital and this is a smaller city and that way you can kind of avoid having to make a um you can avoid making a legend you don't have to have a legend for a political map though you can absolutely you can and we can decide to do that you can also uh there's different ways of going about it like you can uh let's go with uh these markers first let's just do uh let's do all the capitals first i think the best thing to do is to make all of our capitals so let's expand all we'll go through our options and we're going to want to pick an icon in the catalog that requires uh that's going to be the capital now each nation state is going to have a major capital okay so we'll go through our icon list and kind of pick ones that look kind of the best for a capital i would assume one that's most probably decorative a little bit pops out a little bit more for instance you could use this human capital right here i think this looks kind of nice um oh yeah we'll get to labeling okay now when it comes to where do you place your capitals you know just like um with your borders they follow natural features most of your of your capitals are probably going to be near bodies of water so it could be at the mouth of a river now the mouth of a river is where the river meets the ocean there's a lot of cities that are on the mouth constantinople uh paris is right along a river uh it's you have london the thames you have the sen in france so uh most of your most largest your capitals are going to be near those bodies of water humans have always uh built their their capitals and their settlements near bodies of water it's where you get your ability to drink to irrigate your crops it's where you can use for sailing for fishing um commerce so bodies of water so if you always have a hard time figuring out where your capitals are it's generally near bodies of water okay so it's got to be alongside a river maybe along coastline maybe you have it up in the mountains and it's accessible only by airship okay those are some exceptions with fantasy you can do all kinds of things maybe there's one underground underneath a mountain right lots of different options so let's first pick a capital for the whole nation state these are not the individual cities it's just the capital so what i'll probably do is put the capital in a spot that's that's probably away from these other borders so that way it's not easily invaded look carefully here if i put a border right here you'll notice it's just right along the border of this other thing right or if it's here right it's right next to this other uh empire right so it's always best to consider maybe putting your uh your capitals maybe away from enemy or other nations so that way they're not easily they're not easily attacked okay so i'm gonna put this one right here in doo doo pants empires are kind of duty pants so let's go ahead and put a imperial right here and we're going to do more to decorate this we're probably going to add a shield and heraldry to represent a house that runs that capital okay so there's one capital there let's make another capital and we'll put it in dingy bob and i'll probably put it down here uh actually i kind of like let's put it right here we'll put it right here along this edge right here so there's then the capital of of incarnate states the incarnate states right by dingy bob and let's see where do we want to put the glendale lens obviously don't want to put it next to that border there so you could put it along this uh i think this is an isthmus here or a horn right here you can put that there or you can put it further up right here so it's closer to some other cities right here you can put it along this edge here it's wherever you want mostly along bodies of water because you're going to want to put it so let's put it right here so there's the capital of the gwen wendlands let's go ahead and make the capital of more of near let's hear the mumbiverse we've got to jam lease and amanos this is the hand region okay let's put this one up against here i think that looks good and i'm also putting them away from the labels of the regions because i want to put a shield above it and for that to work i don't want to go over any of my text okay so i'm keeping that in mind okay let's see here i think i have a capital for each one perfect all right i'm going to also increase the size of them so i'll select every single one in the set and i'm going to increase the size to maybe 45. so it's a nice large size easy to see right okay now we're going to want to pick uh one to be just cities okay now for me i'm going to pick one that's very simple i'm going to bring the size down about that side let's put them next to each other they're clearly very distinguished from each other so again i'm gonna put much of these towns i'm gonna put one one or two in each region okay oh yeah absolutely this is a great one rogue 13 we're thinking about regions also think about administration travel time travel takes time of course to further your capital areas like we need a major local administrative center absolutely so i'm going to totally agree absolutely great suggestion so i'm going to put a couple cities closest to the main capital so i'll put one here and i'm going to put another one maybe right here and then we'll connect those with roads and let's put a couple let's put one here let's put a couple in the marshall dynasty it's nice to have some next to the borders because those can act as a an area of tension if there is part of a larger campaign if maybe one empire is attacking another nation so put two next to each other so that way maybe you have a nice location for an area or a section where some combat or the story might unfold okay so let's go ahead and do that so i've added in three let's just add in a couple more let's just do five to each one two three four uh five that works fine let's do six and do one more in this corner that's fine let's put uh one up here let's put two next to the empire the um next to the capital and then let's also put some randos in the center not all of them have to be by the coast it would look weird if all the cities were by the coast so we'll put a couple in the interior okay that's what we call the interior put one here put one closer in let's bring another one closer in over here along this regional border and let's add a couple along the coast one here one here one there i'll put one in the interior another one in the interior over here okay let's just keep going we'll put put them all along the interior along the coast and the borders there we go i'll put one here next to not so happy place sploops geronto needs one i swear okay let's take a step back sweet all right so we're putting those dots in again uh for you you definitely want to uh think about the distance the travel that takes in between each one now if you've already if you've already made your map you don't have to worry about all that stuff because you've already put down all the locations on your map that's why in the beginning when i recommended you when you use your own map that you group all the objects first and then drop the opacity or bring down the contrast okay and that way you're using that as a guide in the background to put all your stamps like on top okay now i didn't i didn't do that with this one i'm just this is just kind of a rando but that's exactly how you would do it okay if you missed that part just go back in the beginning where i mentioned how to go about doing that okay now let's take a look we'll we know you know what we need someone when wendland's sorry gwen we forgot all about you i'm so sorry not to me throw some in the interior here one over here i think would look good bingo okay let's take a step back see how it looks just want to make sure that there are dots in each one make sure that things are close to each other that looks good let's put another one rando right here okay now i'm going to save and then we're going to go to the next part which is we're going to create roads because you would expect roads leading mostly to the main capital okay most the roads want to branch out from the capitol and go to the other cities so now we're going to use a different uh curtain type for that nimrod aye eyes on you gotta make sure you pick that curtain tool no make sure you select the right path and we'll get to that okay so we're gonna go ahead and save real quick all right one second sweet all right now i'm going to create a new path and this is going to be roads now i'm going to do this a bit differently from my other pads i'm going to probably choose white for my path i'm going to choose a black outline so it pops out a little bit and i'm going to bring the shadow way way down so that at least there's a little bit of black line underneath so that way when it's on the white it will it won't disappear okay so let's just do that one second here let me apply it on here just to see how it looks okay let's bring the opacity down a hair and let's bring it all the way to zero or uh negative five because i don't want it to go on top of my icons i want to be underneath okay now when you're adding the roads again start from the capital so let's just do one path at a time let's start with a path leading to here okay now when you're doing your roads you do need to remember that they cannot be straight this is a very zoomed out scale just like your rivers they're probably going to meander a little bit there's going to be rock formations boulders rivers lakes that maybe may not be labeled on the map or beyond the map but they are going to get in the way of the river or get in the way of the of the path right of the road so remember to make your paths a bit um a bit like meet your meandering river so i'll show you so we're going to go along here we're just going to follow uh the the coastline and connect to here okay and with this same one you might want to go along the coastline stop it remember don't go underneath just like with our with our uh borders we didn't go underneath just stop it and then connect back again like this oopsie those are a little straight i don't really care for that let's try that again my mistake there we go there we go some meandering there we go okay so now you have those paths so again just make sure that you don't uh go underneath the text because you'll see now that it almost looks like there's a border going around it where the path doesn't touch or the curtain all right so let's go ahead and connect to the next one so now with this you don't have to make another path that goes all the way to here just continue on the path like this like that okay same thing here we're going to bring this one up follow along the border here let's see that didn't turn out to right let's do it again there we go i'm going to stop it there so it doesn't accidentally touch zamasu dynasty and then just continue the path to the next uh location let's see that package is not working right let's do this again there we go right and let's do another one let's connect this one to this one okay all right now we also might want to consider connecting uh this one to this one up here so let's just go all the way down like this i'm going to stop it at the border i'm not going to go well i did go over this border so it's okay if you want to do that my mistake i think it's really the text that i'm most concerned about but let's go in this way like this and again just don't touch don't touch don't go underneath the text part okay so now you've got the roads leading to each kind of location we're going to get every single one so this this capital is here so let's just have this road travel along the coastline and go to this one let's go ahead and move the map over and then we'll go over to this one and kind of connect this one remember don't do straight you want to do some curves a little bit so that one's connected let's go ahead and bring this one over here with that one there we go is there any more over here yep there's one more let's go over here okay there we go perfect let's keep going let's uh put a path that leads here and then goes to this one and if you want you can have a path that goes to this as well and then let's continue this path going along to here because you kind of want to get to this city as well there you go let's just take a step back and see how it looks so far just want to verify that the pads look okay yep that looks good that's connected sweet that looks fine i didn't go over the text looks fantastic great sweet and remember we're just going to do this to every single one you always start at the capitol branch out to each location in fact i'm going to add a couple more to make it so the distances aren't quite as intense to each location so i'll throw in a couple more copy paste let's throw one down here in fact i forgot to even put some down here so naughty on me i will be thoroughly punished let's put one in this corner there there we go now we got a couple more nice all right so leading from the capital to the next location to this location just go all the way to each one remember winding them as you go okay we're doing good easy stuff you see political maps are not as complex as you thought now are they kind of easy the only reason why it's taking longer is because i'm a big blobby mouth man there we go let's take a look um yeah that looks good so far you could even if you wanted to let's add in um one here and one here so i can kind of connect those roads together so let's just go here all right just keep going there we go all right looking good all right now i think i am done actually with um the colored pads so i can if i want to go in and select every single colored path so i'll go through my object list and select every single path that's colored yellow this is this is a bit time consuming because you can't select individual pads uh for their color unfortunately one thing you can do though is turn all everything off and then go to path and only all your paths will show up you'll see that only in the right panel only pads show up so now i can go in click one hold down the alt or command key and select each individual colored path because what i'm going to do with these is i'm going to flatten them to the fg layer that is the landscape the landmass okay and the reason why i'm doing that is because i don't want that color that outline to be going overlapping onto the ocean i think it's kind of tacky but that's just my personal preference you do not have to do that if you don't want to but i'm going to do it so i'm going to go ahead and everything's been selected i'm going to go down to flatten to fg only okay now i'm going to zoom in real quick and you're going to notice that that red blur is no longer on the outside let me just go undo real quick and you can see the difference you see how that red is on the outside there's a little bit of blue on the outside let me go back let me undo what i just did and you notice the difference see nice and crisp that blur color is gone and now it's nice and crisp you have this nice hard black line no red going over it or orange going over it so that you only need to flatten them once you're all done with the coloring stage okay um and remember you don't want to flatten all your pads just the colored ones to represent your borders flatten into the fg layer so again they don't overlap into your bg okay let's keep going with our roads we want to keep going we're almost done we got to do the empire next z evil have halloween empire you jerk butts let's do you now okay let's go ahead and just kind of make the roads go into each one and with this one again you can just make sure that you don't go over underneath the text same thing with this one we'll go here [Music] there we go it's a little straight right there i don't really care for that that's that's icky ickybaby no no no no i do not approve there we go let's go ahead and connect this one this could be maybe an important kind of city right here so we'll connect these is there any reason to use the same layer for your roads so flattening the border pads is easier as they are the same layer with nothing else not that i know of well yeah you could put them on the exact same layer because there is a selection tool for layering as well if you go up here you'll notice there's this right here enable layer selection filter and then you can just pick uh put all the paths on one layer and then all the other stuff on different layers and you could flatten them that way that requires a little bit of pre pre-planning but me personally i just do it this way but it's whatever method really works best for you okay let's keep going it's a good question rogue i'm enjoying all the questions good stuff i like when people ask questions ask more questions okay uh let's see here let's have another road going through my santa to this section so i keep going again don't touch that text right don't touch that text i'm gonna go put a path there and keep going all right thank you philip by the way for helping i appreciate it let's keep going and next we're going to be um we're going to be doing labeling of capitals label um if you want you can label each town if you wish that's up to you if you have a lot of towns then i don't recommend it um because it's going to take up more space but it's really up to you really the most important locations are the ones that need to be labeled particularly to your campaign so if you're expecting to go to this city in your campaign then absolutely you probably want to uh include uh the label of that town but you don't have to it's really up to you how you want to go about it okay let's keep going let's add another one going to this one i just want to connect most of the towns the cities these cities together what i kind of want just to make sure they get connected again nice and windy you want to make sure that your roads aren't perfectly straight that's a no no that's a naughty naughty there we go get a little bit of curve in there all right let's go ahead and push this one in again just avoiding um avoiding the text connect this one let's make sure we connect this one it's going to follow along the coast perfect there we go where are we at here uh oh there's a one up there too so let's go ahead and take this road and go ahead and connect it into here kind of a straight line there but i'm not going to worry about it too much it's because my computer is just lagging a little bit okay let's take a step back let's go ahead and save i'm going to refresh the page after the save after you've done done a certain number of saves it's best to to refresh the page i've saved at least a dozen times here so let's go ahead and just refresh the page after saving make sure you save first don't refresh then save i mean you'll lose all your work so definitely save first and then we're going to refresh and then we'll move on to the next parts we do want to include a frame we do want to include maybe some shields um you can put shields over the capital with the herald achievement on top of that you could have the shields incorporated into the border if you wanted to if you don't want to have the shields taking up any of the space on the map it's up to you we're going to do a different we're going to do some varying things okay with it all right i'm gonna go ahead and step away from this section right here i'm gonna put a little bit of geography in here and i'm just gonna um do what i did in a past map i'm gonna create use very simple fantasy battle map sand dunes and i'm just going to use them as uh to represent mountain ranges at least because this continent above is not included in this campaign it's not important okay so what i can do is just throw in some terrain uh to um show that this part of the map is not involved in uh the conflict okay so just this part this these continents right here are involved in your campaign and so i'm gonna go ahead and change the opacity the blend mode to luminosity so it picks up the color beneath it you'll notice that it has the same color beneath that's what luminosity does see how it's blue here it's white there see how it's blue in here see how it's red in here okay so using uh the blend mode allows you to uh change uh the color of a stamp so i'm gonna go ahead and piece a couple of these together to kind of create some mountain ranges in here and i'm gonna make sure the shadow part is always facing uh kind of the same so let's go ahead and put a mountain range right here make sure i don't go over the borders here the line work goes out don't do that make sure that it stays in let's go ahead and throw in a couple more let's throw in a curvy one right here okay let's throw in a couple more let's do not that one this is this one this one looks fine well i don't really care for that one let's do this one this one looks okay let's throw in another kind of range right here and so again i'm just showing geography on these on these other ones because i'm just kind of showing that these are um and not really involved in the main campaign okay you don't have to do this part you can use whatever style you want the last political map i made that's on my profile i did this same thing by adding in doing so i'm just doing in this one but you can use whatever stamps you want if it's a fantasy world map you can use the fantasy world mountains you can use the fantasy world uh uh cliffs whatever is whatever it is you want you can do that okay me personally because the emphasis is on the political part i'm not gonna add in all this detail in a section that's not really involved all right i'm going to make it somewhat boring because i want the focus to be on the political half of the map okay that's where my focus is now if you don't want any geography at all other parts in it you can just resize the map to where only this geography shows up only this part right here but for me i'm gonna again just throw in this because i personally like it i think it kind of looks cool so i'll continue adding in just a couple more mountains in here throw in a couple ranges and then i'm going to uh not worry about not worry about it after that okay let's do a couple more let's do this one make it a little bit bigger there we go okay and let's go put some mountain ranges over here as well on this side put it along here like this let's put another one down right here let's say right there looks good okay all right all right and if we want we can also um bring the contrast down if you want uh to or bring them change the brightness so i bring the brightness up if you want to kind of blend a little bit better uh i think you can also drop the opacity as well if you want to put less emphasis on it so you notice that if i have it at full opacity that those shadows really pop out but if i drop the opacity down you'll notice that they really begin to lose the contrast in them and that's good because i want the eye to focus on the political region i'm just going to add one more round mountain range right here on this one and we'll put it right there okay there we go well actually you know what when i say one more i meant two more we'll put it right here there we go okay so now we've done those ranges now let's go ahead and talk about a little bit about doing our labeling our capitals okay so there are several methods that you can do to label your capitals one of them is just to give it a nice big text with a with a banner on it another way is to throw in a shield of some kind we can go to fantasy world and we can um take our shields and uh obviously associate them with the proper color so blue empire well guess what it's probably gonna you're probably gonna want to take a blue shield of your choice okay let's zoom it up and i'm gonna put it right over sorry turd i'm gonna cover you up i'm going to put this shield right on top like this i'm also going to boost the saturation so that it really pops out that blue and we might want to change the u to where it kind of fits the proper blue so maybe that one might be a better better blue than the current one if you don't like that you can just keep it as it is as long as it's relatively within the same color i'm obviously going to take uh this down a layer let's take this down a layer i'm going to select all my text and um bring them down a layer select all text they're at layer name positive 3. let's take them down to layer one for a reason so that way i have some space to put some other things on top because i am covering up this town this and that okay so we'll put a shield over each capital with the right color and the shields can be the exact same kind of shields or they can be different it's up to you you want to have a different shield for each one you totally can so we can put one right here above this one and i'm gonna boost the saturation because i do like those nice and saturated they got that bright red nice popping out let's go ahead and grab another shield now i don't know if there is orange but we might be able to pull it out of uh with hsbc let's just find out one second let's boost the saturation and see if we can find an orangish color i think that works good let's boost the brightness a little bit there we go there's another one and then we're obviously going to have to do a yellow one as well so let's go with this one right here all right and we'll go ahead and put this one right over this capital like this and of course bring up the saturation and we're going to change the u see if we can find a yellow i'm not so sure if i can get one out of it i can try let's boost the brightness a little bit and see if i can bring that yellow out super hard those those ones are hard to do let me take a step back and see you know what i don't care much for uh the location see if there's an arch between these three shields so i'm actually going to move things around a little bit i'm going to go ahead and put the capital right up here move this here and so this one is overlapping and i think will be a little bit better right there um i'm gonna go ahead and change the capital for this one as well to right here so the shield is a little bit better positioned so i'll put it right here so it's just hanging out right there in the ocean space um same thing with this one we'll put the shield right here next to it instead of on top so that way it's not overlapping the landscape and for this one i'm going to also change the capital to another location to where the shield is a little bit more in the ocean it's just my personal preference so i'll go ahead and change the capital to right here okay and i'll just put another one right here okay all right and we'll go ahead and put a path that leads to that there we go okay any questions feel free to ask so now we have the shields there now if you feel like the shield shields don't look good right there you're like yeah i don't really care for that it doesn't really go well with the aesthetic you can move those shields into the bit into uh the frame okay if you would prefer to maybe put more detail into each shield so you can really see the the heraldic achievements of it then maybe incorporate them that way so does anyone have any personal preference me i feel the shields don't match very well with the political part of the map so uh does anyone care if we decide to go with um making the shields into the border anyone have any preferences we do need to label the capitals though for sure and we'll get to that part as well so as anyone have a personal preference let me know uh i honestly like them in the border i think that's a kind of a good idea sweet okay so we'll put the four different locations in the frame okay but first let's go ahead and label each capital okay hey aaron 95 first time chat awesome glad that you spoke up sweet glad that you are all here i love it okay so let's go ahead and make sure that the text is going to be a little bit smaller right you don't want it to be the same text size as your regional as your regions because it's not a region right you don't want to be as big as your nation state text size of course doesn't make any sense right but you do want them to pop out so one thing you're going to want to do probably is to make sure that one they are at full opacity so all the way at one okay so that way they pop out two make sure that you add a full outline that really pops out you really want that to pop out and if you want you can leave the shadow on or off it's up to you how you want to go about it so now we'll label each capital and um we're going to call this one what is the name of the city the how halloween empire empire let's just call it holla okay hala is the major capital of this location all right and one thing i'm going to do is probably make sure that it doesn't touch any of the pads i'm going to turn off that shadow as well so you'll have hollow let's go ahead and do another one okay the great white city okay well we'll call this one ivory for now because it's such a small space not much to work with but you can label it wherever you want i'm just going to call it ivory hope you don't mind gwen uh gwenfield let's go with this next one we'll call it mati because i am the dictator as you have so nicely said about me all right um the next capital here will be uh okay now one thing that i probably will want to consider doing is that i'm going to select these again and probably make the border of the text a little bit wider so that that way they're a bit uh they stick out a little more so watch what happens when i boost the outline of the of these capitals you notice that that white path kind of makes the black part pop out more right and that's really nice okay you can also include an object shadow um that's white around each one of these um these capitals if you want you could absolutely do that you could just select one go to that hamburger one and go select all stamps like this so we'll select all those capitals and then just go to shadow object white shadow go ahead and bring it in and that way that will pop that that capital will pop out a little bit with white okay that or you can just paint underneath a little whiter if you want them to pop out so you'll notice see how that white made these really really really really pop out okay now you can label each individual city if you want i'm probably not going to label every single one but i'll label a couple and i'll show you how i do it i'm going to make it even smaller and i'm going to drop the opacity okay because these cities aren't as important as the larger cities so i'm just going to pick maybe one or two cities in each section and label them so we'll just call this one do cut and then we'll go to another one uh and the ones that i'm picking are the ones that have the most crossroads see this city is kind of important because it's a major crossroads same thing with this one so i can call this one uh uh mimi okay all right let's go with uh we got at least label one let's call this one marsha or brian there we go the city of brian all right let's keep labeling these cities let's go with this one we'll call this one gwen okay let's keep going this looks like a somewhat important place right here so we'll call this one hem all right yeah i get to see of course you do my good man we would never deny you your right to have a city label after you that's ridiculous we'll call this manly man manly man i don't know what that is but we're gonna call it manly man all right there we go let's see here what else we got maybe we can label just one more right here let's call this one right here just call this one feet because hey why not there we go let's see where else do we have one let's put a couple more in here let's call this hippie okay there you go each section let's go with one up here as well let's call this dole there we go all right let's take a step back and see how that looks so far yeah i like that i think the the white the white out borders might be a little too thick um you know i might want to bring them down just a little bit more and maybe might have overdone it to this of course just bring that around just a little bit there we go i still wanted to pop out but not crazy not cray-cray okay brian needs a temple in that city the temple a very naughty boy 100 i concur you have my vote you immediately win you get my vote immediately okay let's go ahead and save and we're gonna do the last kind of step i mean this part most of it has been done now you've done the region that has nothing to do uh with the central conflicts within the campaign we've labeled the section we've given them regions cities capitals and now we want to make a border now the reason why i'm adding a border is because a political map is a specific kind of map it's not like a battle map right i don't normally put borders or frames around battle maps it makes more sense to put a frame around maybe a world map a parchment world map uh maybe a central region where most of your campaign takes place at you can put a border on that one a border around your cosmology map a border around uh whatever so knowing where like what to put uh when to put a border is kind of important those are the maps now there's a couple ways to make borders but the easiest one is to use the mask tool okay now when it comes to using the mask tool you have to factor in that there is a blue outline around so if i use that at mask mode i'll have those same mask effects now that's something that can be uh fixed we can uh change that to where it'll work better so we'll we'll do that i'm going to go ahead and first go to the grid and i'm going to change the offset a little bit let me check this side and i want to make sure the offset is set right because with the grid you want to make sure that it's it's lined up properly so i'm going to move this a little bit this way make sure that the path yep there let me check down here that was fine and let me check right here okay that works just fine okay so now you're gonna go and just take the mask tool the grid shape size one okay and i'm gonna go one space away from the border okay so i'm gonna go down with the add mode like this all right now don't worry about the mask setting uh the stroke settings yet we're gonna change all that because when you're doing borders you have to factor that in so let me go ahead and just first make the border with the mask tool super easy to make borders with the mask tool let's go ahead and subtract that oopsie i want it one away from the edge there this is the easiest way to make a frame that i know of let's go all the way down this way and we're going to paint the frame too whatever color or texture whatever it is you want we'll go in like this okay there we go and i don't personally like the blue mask effects so of course we will change that let's just take a step back and just see how it looks with the first the border on it let me turn off that path tool or turn off the grid a bit thick but i think it works fine let's go ahead and change the mask effects i don't really need a blue outline i think that's not necessary to have it's a political map um so instead we'll just do black and we're gonna bring the opacity way way way way down and i'm i'm adding it because i want to use mask effects to my advantage to kind of give a little more detail so mask effects are more than just your coastlines they can also use contrast to make things pop out like your frame can pop out your continents are popping out so i'm going to change the shadow now you'll notice that there's a nice shadow effect around the frame as well as the continent so it kind of helps to make that frame pop out now some of you will notice that well wait a minute this part of the landscape is um this part of the landscape is connected to the frame well hey that's what the paths tool for is for go to segments black give it a little bit of a shadow okay and you're gonna do segments and you're gonna click hold and go down like that okay now we're gonna have to change the settings a little bit okay we'll bring down the width size i'm going to bring up the opacity i'm going to change the path a little bit add this bring in the blur there we go and now you have a line that separates your border there same thing here okay just go in path tool shift key and connect the lines same thing here connect the path tool and now you fixed your line problem that you had right there okay that same thing here we'll probably just do the same thing here put in that path tool there we go perfect let's go ahead and see if there's anything else that we might have missed just to verify not push the path down so it's going over it properly let me take a look uh we got one there nothing there got those two and i think nothing connects over here that looks good okay now you have to pick a color that you want for your um for your uh frame okay so i'm just going to pick this hard white color for now set to fg layer 1 and i'm just going to go in and paint in the whole frame this kind of white color now make sure that you don't go uh onto the actual landscape so what i do is use that grid tool because i used the grid tool to make the frame therefore i can use the grid tool with the paint brush to paint it okay let's go ahead and do this looking good so far okay all right there we go now let's take a step back just see how it looks yep i dig it so far so good that white looks nice um it goes it contrasts against the dark uh of the stroke line the shadows look fine it matches with the stroke around the land masses so overall i think this frame kind of works well now this is the simplest type of frame that you can make okay there's all kinds of ways to make frames all kinds of unique decorations so many things you can do you can also make a frame with stamps now i have uh next month we will be showing you how to make your own frames with both the mask tool and the stamp tools so i'll show you how to make those really unique awesome frames nemrod already knows how to make incredibly unique frames uh great maps that they've been making so they know very well that frames are super fun frames allow you to really bring out your creativity you can put backstory into a frame you can put in details you can put in text lore add in people shields all kinds of fun stuff can go into frames i don't want to go into too much detail about that because we're going to save that for the next stream or for not the next stream but the stream that's going to be hanging on next month but frames are they're wonderful they're so much fun so i'll real quickly i'll just do a couple more tricks that you can do to decorate your frame if you you can paint it all different ways now the most simplest way to paint uh your map is with the basic um cube or the basic um chessboard so if i go on like this i can paint each corner that's a bit too dark let's go with a little bit not too dark that's so so dark let's go with a lighter color this gray right here and you can go in and just create the checkerboard or the uh the check that goes around because that's on a lot of frames of maps is this kind of checker format now the way that you do this is that you might want to consider turning your grid on because sometimes you might not get exactly equal one space in between each one so start on each end moving inward like this okay so start inward each section moving inward now for this one it worked just fine see it had the perfect amount of spaces it worked out just fine this is the simplest decorating border that i can think of with the um with painting okay but there's a lot of different ways that you can do frames i mean a lot so for now let's just go ahead and do this one we'll do the easy one and if the border is too big you can totally change uh the size of the grid to make your border a lot thinner okay let's just keep going into the centers at each end going inward just to make make sure that i don't actually do it wrong okay we'll go in we'll go in and as you can see here there's going to be two in the center and in fact i'll just do those two right in the center so that way i know where they are so we'll go in and i'll make sure turn the grid off and i'll show you some really cool tricks on how to put the grid uh on your map but only in certain areas of your map super cool trick and i'll show you how to do that in just a moment so let's just first decorate our frame again this is the simplest way to make a frame you go onto google images you can go to pinterest and you'll notice that a lot of maps use this kind of frame style because it just represents uh it's just a design that a lot of mappers use so very very simple simple design okay and we're gonna put in uh these shields as well we're going over our two-hour limit nobody minds if we go over go for another maybe uh 30 minutes or so have i captured you all right okay uh i'm gonna save let's go do that real quick first because i've done a lot of changes it's always good to save after you've done a lot of changes and um we'll also at the end put in uh some um we'll put in some filters as well so um there are a lot of different ways to kind of do this frame thing i'll show you some other techniques as well real quick we'll decorate maybe just a little bit more of the frame just for fun but first we're going to save and i'm going to do some changes to the grid and i'll show you some fun little tricks just one moment while we get that loaded up we're also probably going to label our oceans as well we'll do that as well okay so let's go ahead to our grid roll real quick i'm going to show the grid and let's see here we are at this let's go with change this it says 40 here so i'm going to go with a larger number i'm going to go with 80 right here and you'll notice that it quartered you see how it quartered those uh the boxes so it's there's now a four little grids within those little ones so now you can do a little bit more uh designs on your frame with this technique so if you want you can go in like this and you can delete a corner uh like this you can add in a little bit more detail you can add in to make your frame look a little bit more unique just one moment while i use that subtract tool and kind of maybe delete some corners add in extra details on your corners there's a lot of different methods and techniques that you can use to make your map interesting so i can go with the add mode now go in and put another one right here like this and you'll notice you see how the frame changes right it's coming to life now you're changing elements of the frame so really there's a lot of different options that you can go with lots of cool unique ideas i'm just going to go ahead and remove this but i wanted to show you that by using the mask tool you can come up with all kinds of really interesting unique designs and your frame can be very different like sometimes what i like to do is to have my frame um not be um connected in every section so if i wanted to i could remove this section right here and just have corner pieces that decorate my frame okay so be creative go ahead and uh just be really creative come up with unique ideas play around with things there's so many techniques with making your frames okay i'm just going to go with this one because it just kind of looks interesting uh to kind of have little sec segments that are separate so we'll do that i'm just going to do this real quick there we go all right i'm gonna go ahead and fix this path right here as well you'll notice that i had to cut that off so i'll just move it a little bit to the side there okay and i'm also going to remove some of the uh islands right here they're a little too close to my frame and i don't really care for them so i'm just gonna get rid of them a little bit here let me get rid of this island as well there we go okay let's take a step back and let's turn off our grid you know i kind of like this design i think that works just fine again lots of options okay now we want to add in our a legend that kind of represents each kind of uh nation so what we'll do is we'll move these out of the way and what works best when you're making a legend or you're putting a place to put your herald shields it's nice to find the negative space in your ocean and along the border so you'll see there's a nice negative space uh right here this space right here is kind of um i think perfect uh for um putting in your label and your frame so it's a nice section right here to work with so let's go into the catalog and pick up some here we go this will work just fine we'll go with this one we're going to make it fairly big so i put it right here in the corner a couple options that you can do here you can just make it go completely over the border to where it connects with the border like this you can put it in the negative space of the ocean you can put it down at the base at the bottom like this so lots of different options for me personally it's the negative space in the ocean is where i really decide where to put a lot of stuff so there's this nice negative space right here that works perfect okay so what i'll go now is i want to put this down a layer put these on top like this and you know let's have some fun let's have them overlap a little bit overlapping is great to add a little bit more depth and more uniqueness so we'll go ahead and throw on each shield we'll have it overlapping and if it's not wide enough that's fine go over to transform and you can probably change the width and the height so they're long enough to where it fits all the different shields in the knit this space let's have them uh be um just like this to where they're not going over this frame part so we'll go back over we'll change the height or i'm sorry the width again a little bit longer there we go i want to fit each one in this space let's keep going this one all the way over here over here there we go now they should all fit inside of that little space there perfect okay there we go and i'm going to change the height on this one a little bit so it's around the same height as these other shields because it just looks a little odd i'm gonna space these out properly there we go awesome okay now there are other things that you can do as well it's always nice to decorate a little bit uh to add a little bit of decoration something i like to do is what's called a watermark and a watermark is like a very low opaque um kind of uh symbol below i'm sure some of you know what a watermark is so what i'll do is i'll probably go into parchment world and i'm going to pick some heraldry and i'm going to create again what's called a watermark so what i'll do is put make sure that these are on top i'm going to turn off the clipping mask because they're not necessary and then drop the opacity to create a watermark so it looks like it's uh so opaque that when i try to add text on top of it it won't um it won't uh be sticking out so much to where it uh kind of draws the eye away from the text okay so again these are called watermarks okay i'm going to remember the opacity of this symbol it's at 11. let's bring it down to 10 so it's easy to remember let's go ahead and pick another one and we'll have it facing the other way let's put an owl okay again turn off that clipping mask let's boom zoom in the size a little bit more there we go so now you have an owl over there in fact i actually would prefer a different one let's go with um let's go with this one i like this one so we'll put this one in this corner over here so you have this nice watermark again clipping mask bye-bye there we go and i think i'm going to change the width of this one just a little bit so it's relatively around the same size as this one let's go with uh there we go okay and then let's add one more watermark in the center okay and uh let's go with a different symbol here let's not use this heraldic stuff let's maybe use these keys right here just put that right there in the center turn off the clipping mask perfect okay so now you have um your watermarks on your banner let's take a zoom out and take a look yeah i think that looks just fine so now we're going to label each country um and so we're going to wait to probably use some um banners to do that so let's not use banners with a clipping mask let's go to fantasy world and just use non-clipping mask banners let me type in banner real quick there we go let's use these ones for now let's just double check to make sure that they work properly and i'm sticking all within the same kind of theme kind of this goldish color you got the gold of this thing you've got the kind of um the kind of somewhat similar color scheme in the border so throwing in the same in here let's go with a smaller banner that doesn't uh have a lot of flourishings that pops out too much let's put it up a layer let's go with layer three and let's also make it a little bit wider or higher so i'll boost the height there we go i'm going to include an object shadow so the banner pops out and i'm going to do the same thing with these as well let's go ahead and see what it looks like if i select every single one of these shields and pop in an object shadow just to make them pop out a little more okay yeah i think that works fine let's also do the same thing with this object shadow we're gonna make it a little smaller there we go and now it kind of pops out a little bit more on the map nice okay and you would expect you want it to pop out because you want to draw the eye now let's take each one of these um banners and put them along each um along each one of these and we want to leave enough room to put an icon in each shield and it can be just this very simple icon it doesn't have to be crazy or anything like that can just be very let very go ahead and throw this one on there we go now you have each one of those now let's throw on each symbol not complicated easy to do where it's going to go down and we're going to pick just a simple icon for each one now if you are doing your own map you're going to want to factor in which which one is each one so it with me an empire i kind of expect like maybe a crazy kind of imperial symbol this nice uh crown right here might work well um oh wait sorry that is the red let's go with blue my mistake uh let's push that over to the blue okay and blue and yellow are good complementary colors they go well together so let's do that one let's go with the red one and let's choose um let's just say that we'll just use another crown one that's fine we'll put this right on top right here so there's another one let's go ahead and keep picking each symbol that you want to represent uh your your empire let's go with uh yellow let's go with this kind of scorpion one and i'm going to um select each one of these and boost the saturation just like i've boosted the saturation of those um those shields so they really pop out let's add one more icon to the shield to gwen and let's go with a dragon i think that works well let's boost the saturation and maybe change the color of the dragon to a different color uh let's go with purple and orange maybe i don't know let's put it there first and then we can change the u and see which color works best with it i kind of like green let's go with that all right so now you have each um empire with its heraldry with its color and then obviously label each one um you can again uh just call it by the name each one or you can delete it uh and just have the symbols there it's really up to you how you want to go about it really up to you um so from here let's go ahead and just label each one so the blue was called the halvarian empire we don't have to call it an empire in this one we can just call it halvarian and again we're going to change the outline we're going to change the shadow we're going to change the spacing and the line height there we go now we're going to bring the size way down so it it fits into the banner make sure it set a layer above of course there we go halvarian it fits in there just fine or alvaria if you want next is the uh incarn states so we'll just call it in card of course you'll have labels and names for all of your own things uh let's see here gwen when ones there we go and then the yellow is the mirror okay we're almost done thank you people for bearing with me here okay newer let's take a step back and just see how it looks oh yeah i dig yep that was cool so far so good let's go ahead and save that and let's add in the last bit of stuff which is just labeling your oceans okay and then we can maybe uh throw in just a couple things in that legend we'll probably um distinguish roads paths regions cities and a capital okay we are going to throw in a legend so we'll do that i'm going to uh probably group every single thing on the legend so that when i decide to work with text and the little icons i won't accidentally select uh the legend because i'm sure some of you all of you have experienced this before you're working on a map and you're trying to select this one thing but you keep selecting the larger things that are in the way so we'll show you how to fix that issue so let's select every single thing except for uh this right there we don't want to select those pads unselect these pads here so only that's selected we're going to group it okay so i'm going to re-label this group legend okay perfect and we might want to put a another banner uh that labels it so we could go with this banner right here put it down at the bottom it's right there and then type in legend let's just do all caps just call it legend oopsie not working here what's happening here my mistake there we go legend oopsie i want all caps actually let's do that there we go um let's increase the size the bold um and then let's increase the spacing there we go so it kind of fills up the majority of the banner you can even make it bigger if you want one more now it's nice and big takes up the majority of the banner that's perfect okay now you have a legend there perfect all right now let's go ahead and uh select all our icons i'll just select that one there's a path right here i'll put this right here uh let's take this path copy paste put it right here let's grab this one copy paste and put it right here okay all right so let's start with the most important things first uh let's go with um the icons first so let's do this and what might be helpful is to turn the grid on if you want to make sure that things are lined up so let's turn the grid on let's bring it up to layer five and you'll see now that i have the grid on top and i'm gonna use it as a guide to where i place my stuff okay so i'll put one here i'll put one right here let's also take a path let's increase the size so it's a little bit bigger i'm gonna do a segment i'm gonna keep it on this line right here put it right there okay make sure it's up a layer i want to make sure that path is all the way up above there we go make sure it's a flat line and increase the opacity so it can be seen a little better and then let's go ahead and do the same thing with this one make sure we line it up right hold down shift there we go okay and let's go ahead and bring these in a little bit closer one there and bring these in a little bit closer okay and now we can go in and label uh each one so let's go ahead and change all our curve our line height and spacing turn off our bold and uh make sure it's not in uh all caps so capital and just put that right underneath and use that grid to line things up so capital city here we go uh this is going to be a road oopsie an ode it's going to be an ode my friends an ode we got road and we're going to say regional border okay there we go let's go ahead and turn that path tool or i'm sorry let's turn the grid off there we go nice so now you have uh you know your legend and you can add as much as you want this is kind of just the simplest way of going about it okay so you have that all right sweet now you have and let's just make sure are these are these um watermarks a little too much we can go ahead and bring uh the opacity down on these if you want to make sure that the uh that it doesn't overwhelm you want to be able to see the road want to see the regional border and these things these are the things that pop out the watermarks are just there so that you have some design inside of your legend okay so let's go ahead and move on to another step where i would love to um let's um go ahead and show you a quick technique with the grid okay and and how to make the grid only show up in certain sections of your mount so turn that grid back on okay let's go ahead and double this let's go with 40. um i think i want my grid spaces to be bigger so let's type in 20 okay so now my grid spaces are quite large okay now i'm probably going to have to change the offset to where the grid i want to line up the grid properly so let's go with that now step now the next step is to uh go ahead and export your map so export the map it's at 3k so i'll just leave it at 3k save image okay now you have a grid on this map next step go to your uh brush tool open up the catalog you're going to upload what you just exported okay one second make sure you have no filters on when you do this by the way because you'll double up on filters so just keep this in mind how to create political maps you're going to upload that same thing this is just the scale so ignore that you're going to upload it okay wait for it to upload all right just give it a moment it's going to take a second to load thanks for bearing with me select that now you're going to want to check the size to make sure the size is correct and i think you should be able to put it at 200 let me verify uh no it might have to be 300 let me just double check uh nope it's not let oop 3000 that might be a problem you know maybe it's 250 let me just verify here with the right size is this part can be kind of confusing to get it to be the right size to line up okay there we go i think it's a two one second i think that's lined up um okay i think it is let's turn off the grid and we're gonna verify this real quick now you've got that selected now make sure it's set to bg drop the opacity down and bring the brush size up we'll use a circle brush okay and i'm just going to go ahead and paint to where i know let's bring your pass all the way up you'll notice that the grid only shows up on the lan on the uh ocean part okay so this is a great technique to kind of get rid of the grid on your land but only have it on your bg layer and honestly i think the grid just looks really interesting that way when you when you do it that way adding in the grid into these spaces really really helps to give a little bit more um a little more detail okay now let's keep going we're going to add up just a couple more things real quick i'm going to add two more things and then we're going to be done one thing i'd like to do is just remove maybe uh the blue and the outline here i kind of feel like it might be more fun to make the whole outside black and that way it will cause it to pop out more so i'm just going to test and see how it looks so please bear with me for a moment here i'm going to uh make sure i put the grid to the proper uh what i had it before as well so let's go back here let's type in a 40. i believe that was the proper grid size let me verify here and let me get the offset correct there we go offset is correct excellent let's also do subtract um these sections right here i don't want this stuff to be popping out so remove that okay we'll add that so make sure there's nothing popping out outside of my border oh you see i did screw it up a little bit i can see i didn't line it up right oops now you at home won't make that mistake now will you not me [Music] yeah sometimes the lining up part can be kind of hard okay now i'll turn that grid back off you'll notice where i made the mistake right here you'll see that it kind of went right down i'll fix that as well first let's go ahead and just put some black and the reason why is because normally when you're you have a picture that you print out you normally put a black or a white matte uh frame on the outside so that way the eye will have a rest so i'm just gonna put an entire black uh around the edge here now you don't have to do this if you don't want to because the frame is broken at each corner like that this might not work okay but different techniques all right let's go ahead and put that on there just see how it looks and i might like the actual blue there better if you want i can let you all decide that okay first i'll just put it all on and just see how it looks first if it doesn't doesn't look pretty we won't keep it we move let's take a step back here um you know i think the black looks okay i think the black looks nice it doesn't cause the ocean to bleed out beyond the border and i i like that it further encapsulates and calculates uh the the map so i think that works out great let's go back to texture i'm gonna quickly fix the error that i made over here because duty duty pants over here made a mistake naughty naughty i'm gonna go in and just kind of paint this section and kind of remove uh the parts that i kind of boofed on they are not a okay let's take a look here other sections that i might have boofed up on yeah right there it's okay and it's all right if you're um it is perfectly okay if uh you paint uh and remove some of the border there are these the hat the um grid it's okay if you erase some of it in fact you'll end up doing that once you start labeling your ocean so let's get to that part let's get to that last part we're gonna label our oceans okay so let's just label the the ones with the most space so there's one right here nice and large me personally i want my text to be completely separate from the labels of all the other stuff so i'll go with no shadow and a uh we'll go with a white color instead we'll change the opacity oopsie that is the size but we're going to make the white and we're going to change the opacity and make it pop out more we're going to increase the size there we go let's make sure that it's at the right angle and we'll call it uh deep blue let's just what we'll call it deep blue now just like i labeled my uh the halvarian empire i put some spacing to fill up you're going to want to do the same thing with your oceans uh go ahead and increase the spacing and then increase the line height like this and if you also want to you can uh space like this to have them offset from each other up to you if you want to do that or not and once you've done that label part now go in with that blue texture and just delete all the lines that's touching the label okay so this way your lines just like the line work inside here doesn't touch any of the labels same thing here just go over the text with that blue ocean texture so that that way the ocean the grid is not touching okay let's go ahead and just add another ocean in here we'll call this the southerly ocean or the southerly sea works just fine we'll put it right there don't forget go in and make sure to remove any line work that is pretty much touching uh the text okay there you go let's add in one more ocean do we have some room here let's call this one uh the abysmal c for uh abysmal oh no is it one l all right there we go abysmal c we'll put that up here in this corner and again take that same blue and just put it right over it there you go so that way it doesn't get in the way okay all right so we're almost done last thing um is you might want to uh have a label for the whole for the whole area so if you want you might want to come up with a banner that is up here at the top like this going over everything and it's the label it's maybe the name of your place if you want you don't have to do that uh you could put the label closer to the legend if you feel that's better totally up to you how you want to go about that so i'm going to quickly save and then we'll jump right into we'll jump right into filters and then we will call it good okay sweet yeah some pretty easy stuff not complex um you know obviously if you're doing this yourself it's gonna go a lot faster than two hours because i'm not grabbing my gob off but it's way easier to make political maps than you think you think well it's kind of complex no it's not it's a step-by-step process you know and i'll quickly review that you start with uh taking take whatever map that you want to be a political map so you have a fantasy regional parchment whatever map open that you're going to clone that first right because you don't want to uh you know delete the world map with all this detail clone it once you've cloned it open that map okay select everything on that map group it call it everything drop either the opacity or the contrast of everything down quite a bit so that way it's you can see the land shapes you can see the pois at least faded a little in the background with that then you can use that as a guide to determine where your border lines are and where to put your icons and stuff like that okay once you put everything once you've kind of done put the the dotted lines for your borders you're next of course gonna want to take a path blur it and pick the color that you want right so you we outlined every single edge with the path we filled it in with a blue with a blue color or whatever color we wanted we made sure the opacity is way down because we wanted that border to pop out right that red this blue that orange that pops out okay once you've done that part then you go in and you paint in the white uh to make sure that the text of the label of the nation state pops out and there's white in the center and again that kind of is this like pillow like shading where you have dark blue right here lighter blue right here and even lighter white right here right that's the transition okay same thing we did here right orange light orange all the way to white okay now the last step is just to go ahead and add in uh your filters and there's a lot of different ways that you can go about doing your filters okay one thing is clarity is always nice because it really causes things to pop out see what happens when i turn it off now if you like the fadedness then don't do uh clarity just turn that off do something else we can delete that let's say that you want more artifacts in your map notice how there's not a lot of contrast in the ocean notice that there is uh it's very light okay you can go in add new filter and you can go in let me zoom out real quick so you can see it when i apply the filter one moment um you can go into texture filters and you can go old paper okay and you'll notice that the old paper puts some artifacts on to it so watch what happens when i turn it off it's a little bit cleaner uh with it off but if i turn it back on boom those are there are the artifacts that you might be looking for to give a little bit more detail into your background you can change it to stretch repeat you can change the blend mode you can make it so where there's a lot of artifacts or very little artifacts let's say that you want the artifacts to only be in the ocean you can flatten it to the b for b g flatten to bg confirm right now only those artifacts will be on the wait a minute they seem to be on the fg as well i don't think that works that's a naughty naughty it didn't flatten to the bg that's not cool man but old paper um there's a lot of different methods that you want to go with uh me personally it just depends on the map that you're using okay um this is a simple map so you maybe you don't want a lot of old paper on there maybe you want to give it a reddish color go ahead and add a parchment you know bring bring it down now you have kind of an overall uh kind of a little bit of a hint of red uh into the map you can do that there's so many different ways and filters and which way you want to go about it personally i liked that parchment i i thought that looked kind of nice it kind of gave it a little bit some purple when you go into the blues right here but i want to bring it down enough to where at least the colors are popping out so if you do do parchment don't have it obviously at 100 let's see what will happen if i bring parchment all the way up to the top let's give it a second to load it will be a little slow you'll kind of notice that uh it's too much right the the colors no longer pop out the way you want it to so if you do use color filters make sure that you bring them down to an opacity to where they're not uh you know making these colored parts blend too much okay but parchment does add a little bit of red into it and it gives it a nice feel to it okay um again you can go in and add clarity if you want those things to pop out see now i've got that red with that clarity so it nice and pops out um lots of different things that you can do we can go into uh each one of these larger uh labels and we can bring the opacity down a little bit to where it's not quite as dark so i'll bring these down a little bit more i think that looks a little bit better i didn't really like them at 100 uh black uh this looks kind of weird and we might want to consider doing let's take a look at these uh you know i think these should be okay so it should be all right so lots of different tricks lots of different methods lots of different things that you can do to make your map more interesting and unique is the filters filters are primo absolutely use them there's only one more thing left that i can think of that you could possibly do and that is to paint uh the deeper parts of your ocean but if that doesn't interest you you don't have to do that uh painting your oceans are really easy you just take the cult the same color of the ocean already and just drop the opacity that's it okay and you bring the softness all the way up and then the size and then you just go in and again it's that operation thing don't touch uh the borders and just go in like this and paint in only uh the darker paint in only the deep parts okay so i'll put some here like this it's up to you how you want to go about this you don't have to i'm just going to paint them in just so you see what it looks like there are a lot of options i cannot tell you how many options there are when it comes to things that you can do in your map so many options okay so if you want you can paint your ocean me personally i don't personally like that because it's a political map and i think simplicity is best when it comes the more details i kind of focus would think of that more with world maps regional maps there's more detail okay so i think that's it i'm just going to go ahead and save i'm going to do a real quick q a for maybe just a couple minutes and then we'll call it good i'm going to upload this of course to youtube and people can watch it i hope this was helpful to people uh political maps are they are a lot of fun and they look super cool great thing to give your players so they can be like hey look we're in this empire so many great things uh political maps can be used for uh you can use it to tell the back story um of your campaign you can use it when you're in let's say your campaign is about political strife uh nation building uh empires invasions defending against an invasion political maps are they're beautiful for all of that stuff so don't be afraid to clone one of your your world maps and whatever style it is and go ahead and apply these techniques to that map so that you have a political map for your campaign i'll also be sure to make sure that this map is clonable so that you can go ahead and clone and edit this for yourself if you want to go over and see how it was made all right well hey that's it everybody no one's asked any questions so i think that means people are good all right sweet well i think uh oopsie you know i just noticed something i did a booby right here naughty look at that i probably done i'm here oh i'm such a bad person let me fix this here naughty i'd hate for you to have to clone and edit uh a pooy map that's no good great well hey everybody thank you so much everyone super awesome really glad everyone was here real quick i just want to mention that what the streams are for the rest of the week um uh on the 25th which is wednesday we're gonna do how to create rivers excited for that to show you guys how to make rivers and following the following day after that thursday the 26th we're going to be doing how to create mountain ranges all right hey thank you everybody so much uh merry map making with your maps please stay safe and healthy and i will see you all on wednesday avida zane you

Channel: Inkarnate

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Id: 6Fo5O7hE4As

Length: 158min 31sec (9511 seconds)

Published: Tue May 24 2022