Art and Map Making Resources
Posted 1st July 2008 at 02:42 PM by Jürgen Hubert
Updated 7th July 2008 at 03:18 PM by Jürgen Hubert
Updated 7th July 2008 at 03:18 PM by Jürgen Hubert
Every game master has drawn a map from time to time. And many wish to have their maps available in an electronic formats. However, professional map-making tools cost a lot of money - so what's a game master on a budget to do?
Fortunately, there are free alternatives.
The first program I recommend is Inkscape, an Open Source (and thus, freely downloadable) vector-based graphics program. Vector-based graphics program store lines, curves, areas as a collection of vectors instead of individual pixels, and thus it is easy to scale vector-based graphics - perfect for maps, in other words. And as a bonus, any printouts of such maps will always be crisp and have smooth curves, no matter at which scale you print it out.
However, it's not so good with special effects if you want to make your maps pretty. For this, I suggest post-processing with a bitmap-based graphics program. One such program is GIMP, which is also Open Source, and remarkably powerful - it can do most of the things the commercial Photoshop can do.
But how can you use those programs to create maps? Well, there are many ways of doing that, but a good site to start would be this page with cartography tutorials. Hopefully these should give you some starters. And if you come up with some neat new tricks, please don't hestiate to add them - these tutorials exist on a wiki, so anyone who has ever edited one should be easily able to create new tutorials.
And as a side note, if you are interested in art in general, the whole website - the Art Tutorials Wiki is the perfect place to get started. It has huge lists of links to art tutorials on any conceivable subject. I should know - it took me long enough to collect them...
Fortunately, there are free alternatives.
The first program I recommend is Inkscape, an Open Source (and thus, freely downloadable) vector-based graphics program. Vector-based graphics program store lines, curves, areas as a collection of vectors instead of individual pixels, and thus it is easy to scale vector-based graphics - perfect for maps, in other words. And as a bonus, any printouts of such maps will always be crisp and have smooth curves, no matter at which scale you print it out.
However, it's not so good with special effects if you want to make your maps pretty. For this, I suggest post-processing with a bitmap-based graphics program. One such program is GIMP, which is also Open Source, and remarkably powerful - it can do most of the things the commercial Photoshop can do.
But how can you use those programs to create maps? Well, there are many ways of doing that, but a good site to start would be this page with cartography tutorials. Hopefully these should give you some starters. And if you come up with some neat new tricks, please don't hestiate to add them - these tutorials exist on a wiki, so anyone who has ever edited one should be easily able to create new tutorials.
And as a side note, if you are interested in art in general, the whole website - the Art Tutorials Wiki is the perfect place to get started. It has huge lists of links to art tutorials on any conceivable subject. I should know - it took me long enough to collect them...
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