THE LEARNING ARCHIVES
Whether you're creating maps for a novel, rpg, or just for fun, this collection of tutorials and map tips will help you create more professional and believable maps for your story!
River Sins Every Mapmaker Should Know
Avoid the river mistakes that instantly make fantasy maps feel unrealistic and break immersion in your world. This guide covers believable river placement, splitting rivers, lakes, elevation, deltas, and other simple principles that will make your fantasy maps and worlds feel more immersive and realistic.
Where to Draw Marshes on Fantasy Maps?
There are so many ways you can utilize marshes in your worldbuilding and storytelling. They can be a place of great abundance and biodiversity, or they can be somewhere filled with foreboding and danger. Either way, it’s important to understand how they actually form in order to place them on your map.
Drawing Deltas on Your Fantasy Maps
Deltas are a key source of agriculture for civilizations due to their nutrient rich soils. One of the key things that allowed Egypt to rise to and maintain power for so long was their acess to the Nile River and it’s delta. Now, lets look at how they form so you can realistically add them to your fantasy maps.
River Rules - Lakes Only Have One Outlet
Rivers are one of those tricky things to draw correctly on a map because they’re almost too familiar; we don’t usually spend much time thinking about how they actually flow through a landscape. In this case, it’s how rivers interact with lakes and how being mindful of this when you draw your maps can go a long way in making your world more believable.
How to Draw Rivers
How do you make your rivers stand out so they’re more than just a squiggly line on your map? In this tutorial, you will learn how to draw rivers that have a sense of depth and look like they are actually part of the landscape.