 Welcome to MAPCRO, the RPG MAP show. My name is Kyle, and this video is brought to you by the Old Road Zine. Check out the description below for details on how to get your hands on this map, and many like it. Today we're going to be talking about how to draw overworld maps, and how to balance your composition through value contrast, so bust out those technical pens because we're going to be drawing very tiny today. I record this audio after the project is finished, so I know that everything turned out okay, and I managed to salvage this map in the editing. I have sort of an instinctual way of working, because of the way that I like to leave surprises for myself to discover at every step of the way. I don't actually do what you really ought to be doing, which is planning out the value composition ahead of time. Now, value composition is always important, but it is especially important in black and white because value is essentially all you have. So how an image reads is entirely dependent on where you are planning your deepest shadows and your harshest highlights. Let's skip to the end, and this is a mess. It's a lot of really nice hatching and pretty lines, but a legible image it does not make. The where the sea ends and the land begins is very difficult to discern, and all of this wave detail while it might be mesmerizing to look at, it is a waste of my time and yours. The biggest problem is around the shoreline. If I'm drawing a picture of an island, differentiating the ocean from the land is kind of the first and foremost job of an island map. And I failed to do this because I kept building up hatching in detail and darker values, values that are closer to black around the shoreline. And then I decided I wanted to draw waves, and waves are made out of lines, and lines make values deeper, and it just became this big illegible mess. So let's take a look at how I fixed it in Photoshop. That's better. Now we can see the difference between the land and the ocean. I've opted again to use an open grid for the empty space. In this case, the water is kind of represented by the grid, and it is kind of presented in this wavy line as kind of a cutesy way of saying that it's actually water. But again, that grid helps this immediately read as a map. I've actually added a compass rose, which is also something really helpful to say like, hey, you're looking at a map. My motto that I try to stick to is always be clear, not clever. And this map a moment ago was far too clever for its own good. It was basically me trying to like show off and say like, no, I can draw all this ocean, just watch me. And that didn't serve the image, and it certainly didn't do the viewer any favors. When you have your technical pen out and you are ready to ink, all of the problems that you can solve with a technical pen are to draw lines and make values deeper, to make things darker, to make things more detailed. And that's not always the solution to every single problem. But with some clever use of the polygonal lasso tool, I managed to bring this back and kind of see the work that I had already put in and kind of honor some of the smarter decisions and sort of chip away at some of the less inspired moments of this composition. When you're drawing a black and white map, you have basically two decisions to make to delineate one object or space from another. And that is to juxtapose it through a dark value against a light value or a light value against a dark value. So really the big decision I should have made at the beginning of this project was is the sea going to be dark and the land going to be light or vice versa. And because it was way easier to erase the ocean than it was to erase all of the details in the land, and basically the point of it, that is the decision I chose to follow through with. If I had but taken a single moment to make that decision ahead of time, I could have saved myself a lot of time and a lot of trouble and even just making a quick thumbnail sketch of how things are going to be laid out and look, that would have been remarkably helpful. One of the other challenges of this map in particular was that I was drawing very, very tiny versions of all of the other maps that I had done for the old road zines. So there are plenty of locations that are original to this map, but every other map that I have drawn for the old roads is represented in miniature on this island map. The scale is kind of wonky, but it's still evocative and I think it will be really fun to kind of do a location crawl point by point as you're solving mysteries and fighting monsters and searching for treasure. My big advice that I can give you when you are drawing very, very small locations on an overworld map like this is to keep your shapes simple and identifiable and try to use straight black as opposed to hatching whenever possible. That is going to help it read the overall shapes and values are going to be what's going to kind of tell the story and give you those details more so than kind of elaborate hatching and all of this kind of stuff. That's it for this video. There are so many other things I want to talk about when it comes to overland maps. A lot that I had learned on this project, but perhaps that's better left for a different video as my thoughts and processes continue to mature as I continue to grow as an artist. If you learned anything nifty or useful on this video, please leave me a like. If you have any questions or suggestions for other videos, please leave it in the comments. And maybe one day I'll meet you on the old roads. Farewell.