#map making tutorial

One morning I was half-asleep while reading the news and saw a picture while reading the news and somehow saw land:

I’ve seen other methods of map making that range from simple (like the Macaroni Method) to super complicated (uh, this one sounded like a lot of work). All I really wanted was a basic map to start with so I could write! I didn’t want to worry about overly complicated plot details that I didn’t have figured out yet. So, I thought, “Huh, backlit trees?”

There are two methods I’ll present here. One’s through digital methods and the other is good ol’ pencil and paper. Both use trees. First, get some pictures of trees (preferably backlit) and through the leaves. If you take pictures of branches, your world is gonna be a little weird looking. I took these this morning:

Let’s start with the digital method first. That last tree looks nice. Let’s pop it into a super simple art program that uses layers. 

Ta Da! Now, make sure you have two layers and put the photo of your tree on the bottom. We’re gonna make a map on the top layer!

Okay! I’m going to focus on this section for the sake of brevity:

I used a simple tapered ink tool so there would be some variation in lines. Then, I traced within the spaces of the leaves! After a while, you can get into the groove of creating natural looking land shifts. As you can see below, you can make lots of tiny islands or big continents! I usually zoom in super close to get those nice jaggedly edges in.

Every now and then, make your tree layer invisible so you can check out your progress:

Hey! That’s looking pretty nice! Even if it’s not perfect, it’s a lot better than my potatoes in water. Since trees aren’t naturally configured to make maps, you can now move the pieces around too! Nothing fancy, I’m just going to cut that big piece of land and move it to the right of those nice-looking islands.

Remember that picture that inspired this method?

I cropped it out in MS Paint (nothing fancy). But in order to have the image big enough to print, I zoomed in on the picture and used my snip tool to crop it out, save it as another, larger image, and then opened the larger image in MS Paint. Just a lazy way to resize because I don’t care about resolution quality (it’ll look super fuzzy):

The print doesn’t need to be in color so you can greyscale it if you want. Quality and color matter very little here. You just wanna make sure you can see those nice, jagged edges that are the leaves. Print!

You know what would be great? A light table! Unfortunately, I don’t have one. So I opened up a white screen on the internet, turn the brightness up on your preferred computing device, and tape this picture to it upside down:

And trace lightly with a pencil. You want to stay loose and don’t press down hard--not good for the screen or the map (heavy lines might make it look more rigid). Also, those black bars are ones I added in using MS Paint because it’s a map I’m using for one of my books. Notice that some of those land masses I’ve drawn aren’t from the picture! After I got into the groove, I started free-handing areas! It’s a bit like warming up to draw. Once you get into the motions, it gets easier to add and subtract. After you remove from your computing device, just work on making your lines cleaner and adding in details like bodies of water or mountains:

This was the very first map I made using the Tree Method. If I had to choose one, I’d probably run with the digital route only because of the ease of creating. My phone has a stylus so it’s super easy for me to take a picture and then quickly whip out a map while I’m out and about. The method outlined here is a bit of a pain for me because I need to print and then use a light source. But it works!