When you’ve spent your entire life drawing, becoming a commissioned artist is highly likely. Although I work mostly in marketing and business development, my extensive background in art has given me the chance to branch out on the occasional creative side project.
I was commissioned to create a fictional map for Inkspot’s upcoming book, Under Vixens Mere. The book is about a community of people living on a marina in houseboats. The vision was a hand-drawn style illustration for the fictional area of Vixens Mere, so readers could visualise the marina, the boats and the surrounding town and countryside.
The author, Kit Fielding provided me with a rough hand-drawn map. The reference image (seen below) included the placements for the Mere, houseboats, pathways, roads, Broome Town, Hounds Woods, Foxes Farm, and other landmarks. I began by sketching his exact map into my sketchbook so that it was familiar to me.
Fielding also sent over reference pictures for each of the house boats. Some were real-life images, others were illustrations found on the internet. The images weren’t always from a side-profile perspective, so I improvised some of the details.
Kit’s map (left), vs my initial map (right)
Once I had mapped out Vixens Mere, I had two hurdles: Designing the boat illustrations, and learning more about cartography.
Houseboats are quite extravagant and have lots of little details. However, the boat sketches could not be bigger than 2 to 3 cm long, so I had to lose some detail. I did each boat separately, using different shapes and details, and each boat has a unique differentiating motif. I got better as I went along. Obvious note to self: the more you draw something, the better you get at it!!!! To learn more about my process for designing the separate boats, check out my blog post on my website!
Next I researched medieval cartography. I had a vision of the finished article looking like a Lord of the Rings map. While it doesn’t look exactly medieval, it does capture the hand-drawn, Catan style I was going for.
I wanted to learn fantasy map drawing techniques and how to draw different terrains like forests, lakes, and fields. I started by watching a few tutorial videos on YouTube for creating dungeons & dragons fantasy maps. While my only exposure to D&D is from watching Stranger Things, I know players become wholly immersed and often create their own maps for quests.
I also looked up medieval maps, picking out the specific features that I really liked for different components of the map, and tested out a few techniques to re-create them.
Before putting everything together, I got the dimensions for the two pages that the map would cover. I then created a margin and a line down the middle to avoid placing anything important over the page crease. Starting with pencil, I just made really light boxes to place everything before I sketched in each component. I drew on paper before beginning digitally because my Wacom tablet had some calibration issues, and also because it’s just easier to get in-the-zone with pencil on paper.
Once I was happy with the pencil drawing, I went over it in pen so it would scan better for the digitizing portion. I fixed errors with Tippex directly to the paper before scanning.
After getting approval from the publishing team, I worked on-screen. I scanned the illustration and uploaded to GIMP, which I then reduced to half-visibility so that the lines were gray.
I went over the lines with my digital brush, smoothing out and changing different components as I went. This was a gruelling process, but I could refine smaller details that a pen can’t achieve. I then used editing tools to move things around, change the angles of certain components, etc.
The final step of digitizing the map was creating a custom digital calligraphy pen (a long rectangular brush, 100% hardness, at a 45-degree angle) to write text that resembled medieval calligraphy. Digitizing the artwork was not difficult, but it was tedious.
The first take-away for anyone reading this: this is my personal process, so there’s no need to follow this exactly step-for-step. I have a tendency to overcomplicate tasks, but my trial and error method helps me develop efficiencies that work for me specifically. Since this was my first time making a map, I now know what I would do differently to make the process quicker.
Firstly, I wouldn’t have gone over the pencil drawing with pen & ink. Modern phones are good enough to scan even a pencil sketch. I also wouldn’t have completely re-done the digital drawing in a new layer either. I would have directly erased/added to the scanned illustration. I would have also practiced my calligraphy on the program more beforehand, just to make the writing even more consistent.
If you’d like to learn more about how I drew the boats and turned those reference pictures into uniform sketches, check out my other blog post dedicated to that process on my personal website.
