You’re an author who needs a map for your newest masterpiece of literature. I’m a fantasy cartographer who thinks you can make a banger map even if you’ve never done one before. Let’s chat!
My name is Cheryl, and I have been making fantasy maps professionally since 2020. You can find my work in my lovely blog host’s debut novel, A Thief Among Liars, Talonsister by Jen Williams, the Hall of Smoke series and Dark Water Daughter series by H M Long, and Pharaoh’s Gold by Thomas Krug.
Today I want to cover interesting things first and leave formatting until the end. Once you actually start the process of making your map to publish in your book, you’ll need to start with the technical elements before you can do anything else!
The first thing you need to put on your canvas is an outline. Often that’s one that separates land from water. How “zoomed in” you are to your canvas will depend on the scale of your story. Your outline may be a whole continent, a coastline, a couple of lakes and rivers. For a city map you would mark city boundaries or the main roads. You might find it easier to work out main areas with an online map editor (there are free ones!) so you can make sure important locations are where they need to be.
To layout the map for Yvelle, Erin used www.inkarnate.com.
If you’ve ever seen a bar at the bottom of a real map that shows how far a mile is, or ten miles, that’s something called Graphic Scale. They’re a fun detail to add if you want to have that element of realism, but you don’t need one. What you DO need is for the distance in your story and on your map to be consistent. Do you have a village that’s one day’s travel away and a castle three days beyond that? Make sure the castle is three times further! Be aware that traveling over mountains or across water can change the distance your characters might be able to accomplish in one day.
Back to the outline. There are some fun tricks for making a flat coastline look natural, like scattering beans or macaroni on paper and tracing around them. You can trace the photos of melted snow patches. Or pick a piece of real coastline on a map and trace bits of that! Whatever your method, I recommend adding variations of different sizes to that so your coast doesn’t look too same-y. An inlet here, a wobble there. Not an inlet or a wobble every time.
Mountains are almost always part of mountain ranges and are the result of tectonic plates folding or erupting with volcanos. Draw a sketch of the fold lines or fault lines and have your mountains follow those. Rivers flow from mountains or other high points down to valleys and the sea, don’t hold back from adding plenty of them!
Give different geographical regions boundaries that make sense with the terrain (no quadrants please. Unless of course quadrants are a part of your worldbuilding). If that feels like an intimidating process, just go ahead and draw some squiggly lines and that will be perfect.
You can choose to draw landmarks that are important to your story on your map. These might be to scale with other geographical features in the landscape around them, but they don’t need to be. A more realistic map will have everything to scale and just have smaller locations marked with text and maybe a dot. Many fantasy maps include illustrations for things that are mentioned in the book and throw scale out the window. Both are legitimate approaches.
I work digitally and usually make a “palette” of trees and mountains that I use for each project. Instead of hand drawing all of them (I don’t want to spend a 40 hour work week just drawing mountains, and I don’t want to charge for that!), I will draw from my palette and arrange them in different groupings to fill out my map (This particular map has only a few mountains so they don’t have a palette, but there are lots of buildings so they have one). On the one hand, I need to be careful that I don’t repeat the same patterns of mountains or trees over and over or my map will look like I tiled it. But a real benefit of working from a palette to fill out larger areas is that using the same shapes solidifies the visual style of the map. You may be familiar with this concept if you play music: repetition legitimizes!
Now that your main ideas are drawn out it’s time to render the map with some detail. Our main goal is to make the map legible. Which part of the map is land mass, or water? Where are the important landmarks and mountains and cities? Is the journey traced across the map in a dotted line? You want your reader to be able to know the answers to these at a glance. If they have to start asking themselves what’s what then your map is not legible enough.
I put shading around the coastline to increase the contrast between land and water. This map is balancing textures in the mountain shading, forest, city ground, and hatch lines on the coast. To make sure everything stayed legible I kept my line weight small and my shading not too dark.
Fun things with map-ish flair to add on top are name banners or a compass rose. My banners here have a shadow underneath to make sure they stand out from the image and are easy to read against the busy city background. If you add a compass rose, keep in mind that their purpose is to point north (or whatever your cardinal directions are). I’ve had editors ask me to rotate a compass to be “right way up” when north was not the “right way up.” Drawing your compass straight up and down is a worldbuilding choice that you get to make as an author. Just know that that’s north now!
I mentioned that I work digitally, does that mean you need to work digitally too? My recommendation is to use the tools you have! The first map I made for a story was using traditional mediums. Actually that sounds too professional. I had a piece of printer paper that I penciled onto and later inked with a felt tip pen. I got the best quality scan of it that I could at Staples and emailed it over to my author friend. Ta da! That’s all you need. But it wouldn’t hurt to buy a piece of better paper that will stand up to lots of erasing.
You’re ready to start in earnest. How do you lay out your canvas?
The dimensions of your book are the crucial component for sizing your map. I use the same inch x inch that the book will be for the maps that I make, and since I’m working digitally I use at least 300 dpi* resolution. This includes any decorative borders I’m adding. If you’re using traditional mediums I recommend drawing the border on your sized paper along with your map. The digitizing scan or photo of your map will also need to be a decent resolution. If for some reason you don’t know for sure what size your book will be but need to get started on the map right away then an 8 x 10 ratio will work. Remember that whatever the size and ratio it will be scaled down a bit to fit within the page margins, so make sure your details and text don’t get too small.
* dpi in the illustration world stands for “dots per inch”. It’s the same idea as “pixels per inch” in the digital world but refers to the resolution a printer achieves vs the pixels that a screen has.
A note when laying out features and places: a map for your book will end up either “portrait” or “landscape”, and if it’s landscape it will be a two page spread. If your map is landscape please make sure you don’t have anything important down the centerline. The map will be split across pages, and it will end up either two separate images on facing pages or the middle of it will fall in the crease between facing pages. You don’t need to make the middle of your map blank, you just don’t want to lose a landmark or any text down there!
I’ve learned so much from other people who freely share resources and information online, and I recommend these in particular:
dimensiondoor_maps on Instagram
wildcraftmaps on Instagram
mapeffects on Instagram and YouTube
Worldbuilding Corner on YouTube (specifically their “How to Make a Fantasy Map with Geography” video)
Fantasy, as a genre overall, is an intersection between fact and fiction, history and speculation, realism and surrealism. I want to leave you with a piece of philosophy that I value in the conversation of making fiction realistic. Adding realism like fault lines, wind currents, rain shadows, and topography that shapes your coastlines, will make your map look legit and awesome. None of it is mandatory. No one can gatekeep you from making something great because of an arbitrary standard they’ve set. The most important job your map has to fulfill is to help readers follow your character's story. Everything else is icing on the cake!
Bio
Cheryl is a mapmaker and conlang script creator. Over the years, she's had the pleasure of working with various authors and organizations. You can find her map work in books by H.M. Long, Jen Williams, Thomas Krug, and E.A. Whyte, and her script work in Caliya's Chronicles of Runes. If you'd like to work with Cheryl, you can find her on Instagram @mapthefantastical and @conorthography.
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