The Four Secrets of Fantasy Map-Making
So, just for fun, I thought I’d chat a little about fantasy map drawing! But before we do, let’s talk about the mapmakers themselves.
In the real world, people who make maps are called cartographers. But since we are talking about fantasy map drawing, why don’t we come up with a fantasy name for this sort of thing.
Let’s start with the word “fantasy.”
Well we all know that fantasy means make-believe and since we are going to draw make-believe things in our maps we’ll use that as our root word. Now let’s add the word “graph.” In this context, graph means map. Put them together and look at the strange word we’ve just made up.
Fantagraph.
See how easy it is to take two perfectly good words and make them completely incomprehensible? But since fantasy means make-believe and graph means map — what we have here is a make-believe map.
Real map
Make believe map
You get the picture?
Now since we all want to learn how to draw fantasy maps, let’s come up with a fantasy name for ourselves. Fantographers. There, that’s a nice make-believe name, isn’t it? I’m a fantographer and hopefully, after this blog, you will be too.
Cartographer:
Fantographer:
Note the striking differences and similarities between these two mapmakers. One is a stable person. The other is a madman who believes ridiculous things like elves and dragons are real. If you passed these people in the street, could you tell the difference?
Now since you all want to be just as mad as me, let’s talk about Fantography!
What good is a fantasy story without a good map — or even better, set of maps — to go along with it? How are you going to figure out where the characters are? More importantly, places in a fantasy world can seem to have as much personality as the characters themselves. A map gives your places life. It makes them more concrete for the reader.
So how do you draw a fantasy map? Well, it’s easier than it looks! For the most part, maps are made up of certain things:
Trees
Without trees there would never be forests, now would there? Here is an example of a tree in real life:
As you can see in this picture, I’ve done my best to duplicate a tree for my fantasy map:
Note the characteristic conical shape. Now here are about fifty trees:
And here we have a group of about three hundred:
My goodness! It’s a veritable forest!
As many of you well know, one cannot have a forest without trees. So I’ve made my fantasy map by first researching the look of trees in the real world and drawing scores of them on my fantasy map. Note how some of my trees are different. This is representative of life, as you can tell in these pictures of both real trees and trees I’ve drawn for a fantasy land:
In verisimilitude, we want art to resemble life and, as you can well see, this fantasy forest does just that!
Mountains
Now moving on to mountains. What sort of good would a fantasy map be without mountains? I mean mountains are, well, mountainous. And that means big! And big things are great to have in fantasy worlds because they tend to impress people. Since impressing people is what fantasy writing is mostly about, you’ll want mountains.
As with trees, it’s good to use some examples –
A real mountain and…
Its fantasy map equivalent.
Note the similarities and variations of rock strata in these mountains. Note the contour and the angles. Mountains do have lots of angles, don’t they? As with trees you can group mountains together to create forests of mountains. These forests are better known as “mountain ranges.”
Note how a mountain range looks on a fantasy map:
Rivers
Moving on, let’s talk a little bit about rivers. Despite being wet, they have certain notable characteristics that fantasy cartographers should keep in mind. First, all rivers are made of water.
Here is a glass of water.
As with mountains and trees, rivers are made up of vast numbers of glasses of water. But since it would be impossible to draw every glass in even a small part of a river, we skip this step and instead draw a curvy line.
Note how the line seems to flow. That’s because, in the real world, water flows. Now since this is a fantasy world, water can flow in odd directions. Like uphill — especially if you’re on the moon’s dark side. But since this is a reality-like fantasy world, our rivers are flowing downhill.
Look at this picture of a river flowing downhill:
And see what it looks like on the map:
So with trees, mountains and rivers, you’ve got a good start. You might also want to add hills — which are like little baby mountains. And you may even want to add really big trees here and there. On Oesha, these trees are called Trees of Life. Since they don’t exist in the real world that we know of, we don’t have any pictures.
But here is a Tree of Life in Oesha. Note how it is almost as big as mountain.
Tree of life:
Mountain:
You get the picture?
Coastline
Last of all you’ll want a coastline. Now a coastline can be a very tricky thing. It marks the border between an ocean and a land mass. And since coastlines contain millions of grains of sand we’ve done our best to represent them thusly:
Coastline
Sand
You get the picture?
Well, now you have everything you need for making your very own fantasy map. Hopefully you will have as much fun as I did! And if you get bored drawing trees — just remember, every tree in the forest is different!
June 29th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
This is hilarious! Reminds me of my whole 13th year of life, after reading LOTR.
June 29th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
Oh thank goodness! Someone got my joke. I’ve received numerous emails thanking me for the good map making advice. Nuts!
June 29th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
I realy enjoyed this! Keep up the good work!
June 29th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
LOL I love it. Thanks for the giggles!
June 29th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
This is great! Reminds me of the maps shown in the “Guide to Middle Earth”. It’s about time there were maps for other worlds besides Middle Earth, and I like the title, “Fantographer”. Might try to come up with a few fantasy maps meself. Thanks for the smiles!
Fairy Blessings,
Marianne
a.k.a. Cydoniagirl
June 29th, 2007 at 3:38 pm
Thanks! I’m glad you guys got a good laugh out of it!
It’s fun drawing maps. Give it a shot! You might enjoy it
June 29th, 2007 at 4:15 pm
You made me laugh with the comparison drawings lol. I myself make maps, but their more on nations, not scenery lol.
June 29th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
That was great Rob…. the whole time I read your blog I had Tolkien’s map of Middle Earth in mind. I especially liked the two guys (wink) effecting drastically the same thing in a different state of world (mind)
haha…..
June 29th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
are u a real fantographer? i’ve heard they’re extinct! yeah, they vanished years ago with the coming of our new universe. i figure u must have survived the delierium. u know, u must know! it’s a corradore between universes, and thet one map above, shows it. Finally, a sign, a fantographer did survive.
tell the world,
Bradley
June 29th, 2007 at 6:55 pm
That was amazing!! It made me laugh while actually giving helpful hints! Haha. Thanks a ton Rob!
June 29th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
It’s great!!!^_^
3ks
June 29th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
It really is funny! Puts me in mind of the language in the Hobbit. As if JRRT was describing mapmaking for a Shire audience. Good job.
June 29th, 2007 at 10:34 pm
Wow, Fantasy mapmaking for idiots. SOOO awesome.
June 29th, 2007 at 11:47 pm
For Bradley –
Don’t let word get out! They might hunt me down and make be do something boring. Like push one button on my keyboard all day.
June 29th, 2007 at 11:47 pm
My only question is: where did you buy that mah-velous hat?
June 29th, 2007 at 11:55 pm
Jay’s Fools’ Shop for Fools
Highly recommended if you’re a fool like me!
June 29th, 2007 at 11:55 pm
In all honesty, I borrowed the hat from a very good friend.
June 29th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
my oh my, Freud would absolutely adore your tree of life
awesome entry.
June 30th, 2007 at 12:04 am
Freud?! Confound it all! Where’s Jung when you need him??
June 30th, 2007 at 1:04 am
I almost woke my ferry godmother from laughing so hard. I wish I had time or I could hire a ferry type gothic girl to draw the maps for me. I drew a map of what a courtyard of an art gallery would looke like, but the the project is imaginary due to drama.
June 30th, 2007 at 8:20 am
Hahaha, that was great. I got some good giggles (love the comparison pics and the hats! haha) and some good insight about how a pro does that sort of thing. I did it once, but only with a city that I invented for sort of a small-scale tale. I can’t imagine drawing all of those trees, even if you do have to make sure to make em different to keep it interesting.
June 30th, 2007 at 8:40 am
I’ve used the term “Cartomancer” for about thirty years. Great times!
June 30th, 2007 at 10:17 am
I enjoyed that. I would state, also, that the maps are one of the most important additions to any fantasy novel. Feed your map-maker well. Make sure that she has proper tools and plenty of incentive. Above all, realize that she, as with any creative person, requires that her muse be present. Teen-tiny chains attached to the drawing table work well.
(I use ‘cartographer’ in my books, as one of the characters actually is one. The other characters call her a ‘map-maker,’ though.)
–CSM
June 30th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
wow, I loved that. as someone said before reminds me of when I first read LOTR… great days having fun drawing maps….
July 1st, 2007 at 10:20 am
Hilarious…I loved the pics that accompanied everything too. I’ve drawn maps for my three of my fantasy novels, and I found this FABULOUS info! ; )
July 1st, 2007 at 10:26 am
Fantastic! It’s great to hear this was helpful! And fun too!
July 2nd, 2007 at 4:17 am
Hey this is realy cool. My husband and I are in the process of creating a world for a role playing game and we both wanted to thank you because it is geting close to the time for us to make our world maps.
He is going to be the G.M. and me and a couple of our friends are going to be the players.
I just cant wait until all of the technecal stuff is worked out.
Thank you again,
Cear (Les)
July 2nd, 2007 at 8:02 am
Loved it! I needed the smiles.
July 18th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
Hahaha.
‘As with mountains and trees, rivers are made up of vast numbers of glasses of water. But since it would be impossible to draw every glass in even a small part of a river, we skip this step and instead draw a curvy line.’
July 18th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
*grins*
I had fun with that! Hmm. I need another humorous blog…
July 18th, 2007 at 8:24 pm
I think you should do a Blog on making up fantasy names…i think that could be just as comical as this. By the way, THANKS for this…it helped so….much? I learned to draw trees…
.>
July 19th, 2007 at 8:28 am
LOL! I did a blog on fantasy names.
http://www.luthielssong.com/blog/2007/02/09/the-mojo-of-naming/
March 28th, 2010 at 9:08 am
Yo Yo super post