Rowland Rose's Fantasy Map Drawing Guide

There are many ways to draw your own personal custom fantasy map. If you want a start-to-finish tutorial on how to make your own, using some pretty simple drawing techniques, look no further!

First I'll list out all the steps, then I'll go into detail on each one, with screenshots. Then I'll give you a quick-guide for doing it yourself.

All the steps in brief:

1. Continents and Islands

2. Lakes

3. Mountains

4. Hills

5. Towns

6. Trails and Shipping Routes

7. Rivers

8. Forests

9. Grasslands

10. Deserts

11. Town Name Indicator Lines

12. Town Names

13. Shade the Lakes

14. Waves, 1st Row

15. Waves, 2nd Row

16. Map Name Scroll

17. Ships and Dragons!

18. Shade Hills and Mountains

Now to cover each step in detail:

1. Continents and Islands

This is the most fun step, and makes the biggest impact on the look and feel of your map. You can be creative and carefree here. I suggest avoiding straight lines and sharp angles. Draw bays and peninsulas and little islands. Do one big continent, 2 or 3 medium sized ones, or lots of smaller landmasses, it's up to you. Imagine things like volcanic island chains and plate tectonics. Perhaps even large meteor impacts. Study real-life maps for inspiration.

2. Lakes

Another area where you can be very creative and carefree. But I wouldn't draw your lakes too small, or else they might get visually mixed up with town markers or even paths later on.

3. Mountains

This is probably the 2nd-most impactful step to the overall feel of your map. Mountains make travel difficult, affect weather patterns, tend to define political boundaries, and as the highest elevation spots on your map, are typically the source of rivers. I tend to put them in the center of landmasses, though just like real-life, sometimes they come straight up to the coast. I draw half my mountains as simple upside-down V's, and the other half with a bit of variation.

4. Hills

Everything that I said about mountains could be said about hills, except to a smaller degree due to their smaller size. Notice I draw them just like mountains but with rounded off tops. These could imply an older mountain range that has seen many years of erosion.

5. Towns

A dot inside a circle is all that's needed to easily see a town, no matter it's surroundings. If you want to add other features, such as small settlements, castles, caves, etc. you could come up with your own set of icons to represent these, and perhaps even provide a key. I'm keeping it simple in this tutorial and just doing towns.

6. Trails and Shipping Routes

Here you imagine what the main paths might develop into as people in your world find the most efficient and navigable paths from town to town (or point of interest to point of interest). Over land, that usually means a straight line, with some slight variation to imply natural obstacles and the natural imperfection in pathfinding. But also curving around harder-to-navigate features, like lakes and mountains. This step you might optionally want to do AFTER step 7. Rivers, in order for your paths to perhaps follow river paths in a natural way. It's up to you.

7. Rivers

Rivers follow the law of gravity. So make sure to start at a high elevation and end up at the coast of the ocean or a lake. The more curves you put in a river, the older you are implying the river is. Consider whether your lakes should empty into the ocean via a river system or not. Try not to overload your world with rivers... too many rivers leave not enough room for forests and grasslands and deserts later. Speaking of deserts, though that's at a later step, start thinking of where they might be now. Rivers tend to be more rare in deserts. Though a river that begins in a wet area, but flows through a dry area (like the Nile) has real-life parallels and is an interesting feature in any world.

8. Forests

Forests are a resource for towns, imply a healthy rainy season, but can impede navigation. I've shown two styles of forest above... deciduous and coniferous (leafy and pine). Pine forests can imply a colder climate or higher elevation. You'll notice in a few places I gave some space around trails and rivers. Whether you do this, or simply draw over them, or avoid putting forests by them all together, is up to you.

9. Grasslands

Grasslands can be implied with simple two and three-line tufts of grass spaced a healthy distance apart. Grasslands are very navigable, imply either a reduced rainy season or a felled forest. They are a good in-between going from forest to desert.

10. Deserts

Deserts are the driest areas of your world. They should probably be separated from forests by a good distance. Rain-shadows from a large mountain range can cause a desert to form, but this doesn't have to be the exclusive cause. For this and any other feature, studying nature can guide you, but also allow yourself creative freedom. If you want a desert in the middle of a forest for the purpose of your worldbuilding or storyline, do it! I live next to some sand dune fields that are right next to a forest, created by wind blowing sand from the nearby Great Lake onto shore over many years.

11. Town Name Indicator Lines

In order to write names for your towns, you'll need to find space for them. Draw lines starting from each town and pointing straight to some free space in the ocean portion of your world (or perhaps a big blank space in a large lake or large desert). Doing this before some of the following steps gives you more room to work with. Draw all the lines before you start writing the town names, so you can avoid accidentally writing in a name, then realizing you crowded out space needed for another town.

12. Town Names

This is another very creative part of the map making process. Here you can decide just how normal or far-out your towns will be named and spelled. If you do make a town name that sounds nothing like a town in your own culture, try to start thinking about WHY you spelled and pronounced it the way you did. Perhaps you can follow a naming pattern with several towns in one area, implying a shared culture. Perhaps the names have some sort of significance for a story you're writing.

13. Shade the Lakes

You could probably do this at any step, but now is as good a time as any. I shade my lakes with lightly-drawn, broken-up, tightly-spaced horizontal lines, implying small wave action on a relatively still lake.

14. Waves, 1st Row

There are several ways to add detail and definition to your coasts. The way I usually choose is by implying waves. I do this by first drawing dashed line (2 long dashes, 1 short dash, in that pattern generally) closely hugging all landmasses and islands. Wherever your waves would intersect a shipping route or name indicator line, consider not drawing the wave in that location, instead of drawing through it. Though it's up to you.

15. Waves, 2nd Row

I then do a second pass of waves, this time with the dashes a bit longer and more widely spaced.

16. Map Name Scroll

We're almost done! Now for some of the fun stuff. I almost always add a rolled-out scroll in an empty space in the ocean, and write the name of the world on it.

17. Ships and Dragons!

Little details like this are fun and can bring character and life to a map! Totally optional of course. Some people add a large compass to a corner of the map.

18. Shade Hills and Mountains

I saved this for the end so you could have more space for paths and other things before taking up more space with shading. My method for mountains is to draw a vertical line from the pointiest spots on top (or nearly vertical) and then draw parallel lines from there to the right, shrinking in height until reaching the bottom of the mountain on the right. It should look like you've given a 3d shape to the mountain. For hills I do the same, though I sometimes do a bit less shading, since they aren't as dramatically tall.

Quick Guide

I hope this guide has been helpful to you, and has inspired you to do it yourself! If you take your time to do this well on an 8.5x11" piece of paper, it should take you about 1.5 to 2 hours.

Here is a quick guide to help you remember these steps. This guide is completely free and no attribution is needed for using it, commercial or otherwise. But if you do make a map using this guide, I'd love it if you'd share it in this Grivio community. Happy map-making!