How to Draw Mountains, Forests, Swamps and Cities for a Fantasy World Map!

in this video I'm going to show you how I draw mountains and forests and deserts and swamps and cities so you can make awesome looking fantasy world maps yeah alright I'm gonna walk you through all the little pieces and parts of what it takes to create a fantasy world map I'm actually going to show you two different styles of Maps the first is a super simple anyone can do it I mean anyone can make this kind of map I call it the icon style this is like the super old-school heck scroll kind of map without the hexes and then we'll move on to something a little more advanced the kind of map that I really love to make I'm calling it the token token token style map this is like the most popular I'd say black and white style of fantasy map I'm not going to pretend to know all the history but I sort of see it as made popular by the fantasy tradition of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings the maps that were published in those books that that junior are Tolkien made this style of map is actually just as easy as the icon style it just takes a little bit more time a little bit more patience so yeah let's jump in I'm gonna show you how to draw a bunch of mountains and trees and swamps and cities and all kinds of stuff let's go okay so here is an example I am creating of an icon style map I'm starting with just the outline of an island and then filling in all of the details with these little icons that indicate what type of terrain or landscape is in that area of the map so the reason I wanted to start with this style and not just jump into a more complicated one is because I wanted to show a type of map that looks awesome but is super super super easy to draw like if you know how to write the alphabet you can draw this map and the cool thing about creating these icons is you don't have to worry about making cool drawings or fighting with the tools that you're using all you have to do is plan out your map where the things go on the map and then you can draw them by hand super easy speaking of tools just in case you're curious for all of the drawing I'm doing in this video I'm using regular copy paper and a Paper Mate flare medium pen this is just a felt-tip pen pretty standard it's cool because if you hold it vertically you can get a nice thin line and then the more you angle the pen and the more you press down on it the thicker the line you get so you can get a little bit of variation in the line but I'm really not focused on that with any of these drawings okay so now that you have a picture of all of the elements brought together to make a map let's jump into how to draw the individual pieces and you'll see how crazy easy this is okay so I'm starting with the coastline and water I usually double up the thickness of the line you know kind of draw it once and then go over it and make it twice as thick I do the same with the rivers and the outlines of the lake just to make it really clear how to separate the land from the water and then drawing the water is as simple as you've ever done it it's just a little squiggly wave lines that you've seen on every map it's how you draw water as a kid it's it's the most basic sort of like up-and-down really shallow connected u-shape waves alright mountains this is what I'm talking about when I'm saying icons super simple I'm just drawing triangles and filling them in I think the only challenge to drawing these maps are keeping these shapes consistent from one to the next I mean I guess with mountains if you wanted to show that there's bigger mountains you could make the triangles bigger and smaller and all that but I'm trying to keep all of the icons a consistent size that's the only drawing thing that I'm really keeping in the back of my mind a slight variation if you want to draw a little snowy mountain you can just do a little zigzag and leave the top blank and then it's a snow-capped Mountain trees super super simple you're gonna draw a circle and then you're gonna draw a little stick coming out the bottom it says it's as easy as it gets for trees and you can just plop them all over the place to make a forest you can vary the shape a little bit make them a little more egg-shaped I didn't draw here you could even do a little cloud shaped trees those sticks coming out the bottom I did draw the triangle-shaped trees here but I didn't use them on the map because I think they kind of looks a little too similar to the mountains you know the mountains are big triangles so then having little triangle pine trees was just a little too repetitive shape wise so I did use this other pine tree shape which is just the the same stick tree trunk and then you draw three upside-down V's on top of it really simple really easy to fill out a large space with a bunch of these trees and make a forest even more simple is the desert to do the desert in this style I just do little clusters of dots you know five little dots four little dots three little dots just kind of spread out over the entire desert you know you're basically just drawing sand here swamps same thing super easy I'm just drawing an icon of what would maybe be like tall grass three vertical lines next to each other that's all you need to indicate a swamp okay cities I'm going traditional old-school fantasy maps where you just put a dot for a village a dot with a circle for a town and then a city a full-fledged city would be a star with a circle around it really really simple visual way to indicate where your cities and towns go on the map and then roads are just a dashed or dotted line and the reason I'm doing a dotted line instead of a solid one is because the rivers are solid lines and we got to do something to differentiate the two so roads get to be a dotted line looks kind of like a path which makes sense for a road oh I forgot to draw hills with the mountains so Hills I'm just doing like a mound oh just a arcing line going from left to right just little bumps in the landscape [Music] and there you have it the icon style map this one couldn't be any easier I just really wanted to show this example of a map that you can make in like 15 or 20 minutes depending on how complicated your world is but something that looks cool isn't hard to draw and conveys all the information that your map needs to really I just want to show that this process does not have to be intimidating and you don't need any fancy equipment you don't need any crazy art tools or be super skilled at drawing to make an awesome looking fantasy man so if you're intimidated by drawing try out this icon style of map okay before we jump into the toking style map token token style map I want to show you my closet I know the lighting isn't the greatest but I have this big flat file full of stuff in this drawer I have all of my miniatures my paper miniatures so I know I've been focusing a lot on drawing maps on this channel lately but I have made a ton of paper miniatures for my D&D game I have an entire pack 50 miniatures altogether the big green dragon giant spiders and bug bears and ghouls all kinds of fun stuff technically it's everything you need for the starter set the official D&D starter set I'm gonna have a link down in the description below where you can get all of these miniatures print them out make them yourself there's a flaming skull it's got a bunch of player characters you know Rangers and fighters and wizards all kinds of fun stuff I also have these D&D inspired pins those are in my shop on my website if you're a dungeon master that wants a cool pin or you hear a wizard that likes towing fireballs check them out on my website okay advertisement over back to draw on map stuff oh it's bright okay now I'm jumping into the Tolkien style map and all this really is is just kind of bumping up the variation on the icons adding a little bit more detail doing a little bit more planning and drawing to make a more varied and visually interesting map so as I'm drawing this you can see I'm starting the exact same way I'm drawing the exact same map only in this different sort of upgraded style starting off with the coastline or the outline of the continent and then moving into mountains and all the other details from there now before I jump into the specifics of each piece in part I want to say that making a key which is what I'm about to show you is really really helpful way of starting to create your own fantasy map instead of jumping right into the final map like I'm doing here spending the time on a separate sheet of paper to figure out how you're gonna draw the mountains how you're gonna draw the forest the desert the swamp the cities all the little things even if you don't draw them like I'm showing you here you spend the time figuring them out then once you jump into the map you can spend all your brain energy on figuring out where all these different terrain types and cities are gonna go and not worrying about how you're gonna draw each of the things alright so this is the example of the tokens style map let's jump into exactly how I draw each of the pieces and parts for this style of map okay so just like the icon style I'm starting with the coastline I always start with the outline of the continent I'm doubling it up just the same way but instead of drawing the little waves I'm doing a thinner outline around the landmass and then another thin outline that is broken up just sort of looks like waves or alternatively you can do a thin outline around the outside and then these horizontal dashes it's something I tried out in the last world map video I did and I think it's a really cool look you know a really fun way to indicate water that is more textural than purely representational like drawing actual all right time to do some mountains so if you think about them the same way you do as the icon style as triangles it makes drawing mountains really easy the only difference here is I'm starting to overlap the sort of triangle shapes and I'm not drawing the bottom it's more of an upside-down V than a completed triangle and also it's not just a straight upside-down V it is varied and kind of chunky and rocky looking that's something that you can practice and you'll get the feel for really quick chunk it up make it look wavy and then to give it a little bit of depth also chunky wavy line going from the peak down and then shading one half of the mountain filling in the the shadow of the mountain basically and so that technique combined with you overlapping these V's will give this mountain range a ton of depth it'll go from looking like a little mountain was just plopped down to actually looking like a mountain range alternatively if you don't want to fill in everything with black you can do the same sort of jagged vertical line going down from the peak and then and then some diagonal lines that follow the slant of the mountain that you made with the upside-down V to give that side of the mountain a shadow and here's why you want to start on a key just with just a little bit of practice you can get the feel for how to create actually rocky looking mountains instead of just straight lines and harsh shadows it only takes the tiniest littlest bit of practice and the same thing for the hills so basically this is the same as the icon style I'm just adding a little bit of shadow to one side or just like the mountains if you don't want to fill in one side with completely with black you can do little diagonal lines that get smaller to sort of give the hill a little bit of dimension alright just like the mountains the trees are basically the same as the icon style just getting a little tiny bit more complicated so it's basically drawing a wobbly circle and instead of just one stick underneath I draw two and then I even put just a little bit of shadow under the edge of the circle to show that the the leaves on the tree are casting a shadow on the trunk and then layering them is super easy if you do the bottom line of your forest these simple trees kind of squish next to each other then all you're doing is drawing the overlap of the trees that recede behind it you're just drawing a little top part of the tree and then the same goes for the pine trees just a triangle with the trunk layer in this the exact same way to fill out an awesome super detailed looking forest that is really just a bunch of circles or triangles takes a little bit of time but looks super awesome or you can draw the complete forest by just indicating the circles by doing little squiggly it almost looks like a cloud with tree trunks sticking out of it or you can do jagged pine trees and kind of clump them all together and not have to draw each individual little tree all right the desert so I think the easiest way to do this is I mean you could just use the same icon style and do dots but I sometimes do like small little dashed horizontal lines or if I really want to fill out the space I will do straight horizontal lines that are like different links like some little dots and some longer lines this gives off like the super flat kind of desert not the sand dune type deserts which you can do by sort of pushing and making a little more wavy versions of the hills that I drew before swamps this is just pushing the idea of the icon a little bit further so instead of drawing three just straight vertical lines I'm sort of making the grass kind of sprawl out a little bit and then by adding the little horizontal lines on the end it sort of flattens it out so it makes it look more I don't know it just makes it look more like a lowland Marsh than a field of grass and I also did a secondary version that's a little more grassy wavy looking okay real quick I forgot to do rivers I like to draw rivers that are just like a black wavy line but you can also open them up and do two lines to actually make the river kind of feed out into the ocean you can add these little marks make it look alike the land is descending down into the river because the river is gonna be like the lowest part of the land try it out see which kind you like better roads I'm keeping them the same dashed line looks the best it communicates Road instantly so I'm not going to change it and now we come to the cities so this is where a lot of variation can come in super quickly it's gonna take a little bit of trial and error on your part to figure out what kind of cities you like the looks of I like to draw these little houses that have slanted rubes and it's like a faked one-point perspective it's it's like not even one-point perspective but you can see two sides of the house and then if you want to give it a sort of medieval Flair you can add a little Tower with a cone top on it or you know drawing these forts you know with the brick walls and the towers and stuff and that's sort of tombstone shape Gate the more complex you make the drawing the bigger the city looks so for a village I start with just one little house a town it gets a house in a tower and then a city gets two houses in a tower and then you can go crazy with it make wizard towers and orc towns and different variations on the houses and the the forts so that leads me to a point that I didn't really show off in these completed world maps and that is that adding a little bit of variation can go a long way in upgrading your map you know so maybe there's one giant volcano mountain that's way bigger than all of the other mountains or the capital city is super huge or there's just a unique looking wizard tower that is visually different from all of the cities and towns on your map that sort of tell the person looking at the map oh this is a point of interest it's a cool place that I want to know more about [Music] and that is the fun of creating these maps really really simple drawing you can create a world for your D&D players or people reading your fantasy book to lose their imagination in so figuring out these little icons they're really just a representation of something more so a little triangle can be an entire mountain a circle with a stick can be a forest or just a little house can be an entire town combining all of them together and laying them out into a map it creates a world of possibility and I think the really cool thing about it is that it's not difficult to do I know I keep saying it but you don't have to be good at drawing to make really really awesome looking maps so I hope that this is encouraging to you and I hope you give it a try if you're feeling intimidated try out that icon style and then work your way up to the token style I really really hope you spend a little bit of time to make a map for your D&D game or your fantasy book or whatever please share it with me on social media get me up on Instagram or Twitter I love love love seeing what you make it's really really special for me and means a lot when you send me the stuff that you create I love seeing it alright that's it for this video let me know if you have any questions about the process and the comments down below hit me with us subscribe and ring the little notification bell to be alerted when new videos go up thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one see ya [Music]

Channel: JP Coovert

Views: 970,314

Keywords: world map, jp coovert, fantasy map, how to, process, step by step, mountain, swamp, desert, forest, city, town, village, cartography, map, map making, illustration, paper mate flair, ttrpg, d&d, dnd, wizards of the coast

Id: d1XEVzX5cxg

Length: 19min 15sec (1155 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 16 2020