Worldbuilding: Map of Miraya - The Beast of Ildenwood

Worldbuilding: Map of Miraya - The Beast of Ildenwood

My characters arrived at the City of Miraya, located in the Kingdom of Samat, a few chapters ago. I should have had a map ready to go then, but a map is... a lot of work. To be fair, it seemed like a pretty big task, and given that I had so many other things on my plate at the time, I didn't feel up to adding another big task to my pile. Eating elephants is harder than it sounds. 

But now, as of Chapter 9 (which is what I'm currently working on), my characters are leaving Miraya on their way to their main destination: Burj Annur. I figure it's as good a time as any (and, honestly, the last possible moment) to introduce a map of the city. I worked on this map for about 3 (not whole) days, mostly because of how time-consuming it is to do the sketching and coloring part of the map-making process - which, to be fair, is pretty much 99% of the process). 

This is the result:

This is my second ever map. So that's cool!

I'll admit that I totally cut corners with this. 😂 After all, it's one illustration for one chapter, and my goal with The Beast of Ildenwood is to create at least one illustration per chapter. Which is a lot of illustrations, and not a lot of time. Also, this was my first urban map. It's definitely rough around the edges, but I'm happy with the fact that readers can get a feel for the concept of Miraya and how it looks. More or less. 

Another reason this isn't nearly as good as it could have been is because I was figuring out my map-making process. I didn't want to spend a lot of time on a process that wasn't effective in the end, and the main goal here was to just see how this particular process works in terms of time/effort. The lack of attention to detail probably also presents itself in the proportions of the actual elements of the city - the buildings and parks and all that other good stuff - everything but the educational buildings in the middle - those are meant to be particularly huge.

(I can do much better with the actual sketching with a little more attention to detail, but this was essentially a bit of a slap-dash job. In any case, I'm not too worried about the imperfection of the sketch itself, and more concerned about the fact that it certainly seems quite time consuming. My characters will be traveling through many different places... I'm wondering how many more maps I'll have to make!) 

The next section discusses the general process - which, once again, you'll notice is quite bare-bones. No inking, no fine details or shading, no street labels, and so on. That being said, I figure the process will generally be the same (apart from a few added steps here and there). I estimate it might take around one week to create a really nice urban map. That's also going to depend on how big the map is and how varied it is as well, but generally speaking, I expect 1-2 weeks (a few hours a day) should do the trick.

Fantasy Map-Making Process

This one was quite simple, though a lot more time-consuming than the map of Ildenwood Forest. The obvious reason is that the forest map is a lot simpler, smaller, and generally speaking didn't require much sketching. Pretty much all the details were done digitally, and I made a single vector for the trees that I reused to create the wooded areas. 

Here are the steps I took to create this map:

1. Sketching. This is the part where I grabbed an ice-cream glass and used it to trace circles for the general shape of the city. Miraya is meant to be generally symmetrical, but I also mentioned that it had many winding streets and alleys and generally a bit of a maze-like structure. I figure a rounded layout would be pretty helpful in that regard. I sketched the general areas, the outline of the edge of the cliff towards the bottom there, and the buildings and other elements within the map, and went over all the pencil lines again to get them dark enough to be picked up clearly in a scan. Everything is done with pencil, because this was most definitely a quick sketch job. If I was doing it the way it should have been done, I'd have added the next step.
   
   
2. Inking. Go over the sketch with a dark ink pen. I was thinking of going all fountain pen and get that really lovely texture around the line edges of ink bleeding into paper. But you can also just do this later on, after Step 3, digitally.
   
   As I was sketching, I chose to divide the city into certain areas - an industrial area, an area that is mainly commercial, an area that is mainly administrative/military, and a few areas that are mostly residential.
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. Upload to GIMP. I use GIMP, but there are a bunch of other great software out there that you can use. To upload the image to GIMP, either scan the image or take a high-quality photo of it. Add an alpha channel, choose the Color to Alpha option, and viola: line art! Or, if you haven't done the inking step yet, you can then go over the lines and ink in digitally.
   
   
4. Color your map. This is pretty straightforward. I created layers for each kind of building or map feature. There was a layer for water, a layer for green areas and spaces, a layer for commercial buildings, and so on.
   
   
5. Add details. I didn't do this, but it's another step that could take your map to the next level. Adding details can include texture for different kinds of map elements or even shading to give the map a bit of a 3D effect. You can also add details like street names, legends, etc. I added a legend to my map, as well as the title of the map and the general directions that the main street diverges into - one leading to Sowarr and one leading to Aks.
   
   
6. Finishing touches. Anything you may have forgotten or anything you've left for last goes into this step. That includes, in my case, filters and playing around with colors, adding a copyright statement, and doing some last-minute cleanup and touch-ups (of which there weren't many because of the nature of this particular map being such a quick experiment).
   

And, once again, my final result after a few days of working on it a couple of hours per day and calling it a wrap:

This map will be featured in Chapter 9 of The Beast of Ildenwood. In the meantime, check out the chapters that are already published here! Happy reading!