 Hi I'm Kyle and this video is brought to you by the Old Road Zine. Today we are going to figure out how to get from here to here. The first step is to print out an isometric grid on some cardstock. There are plenty of places to download isometric templates so just just a quick Google search will really get you what you need. I like to print mine out with very light cyan blue lines because that makes it easier to remove in the digital process afterwards. But before we can contend with our grid paper we must first conquer the sketch page. This is the most intimidating part of the whole process is just looking at a blank sheet of paper and not really knowing what's going to go on it. So there's a couple of things that we can do to help us get through this process but oftentimes you'll sit down you'll want to draw something but you won't know what to draw and that is exactly where I found myself today so we'll see if I can dig my way out of it. Our first strategy against this foe is the humble sketchbook. Now if you are as intimidated by a blank paper that I am you can buy all the moleskin beautiful leather bound sketchbooks in the world and they'll just sit on your shelf and you'll never use them which is why I like to hand make my sketchbook. And as you go through you can kind of see just me playing around with all these different ideas and any words that pop into my head any images any concepts they all live here. I really owe the this breakthrough of using a handmade sketchbook to overcome that first step that fear of this pristine white paper to my good friend Sean who gave me this and it absolutely transformed my artistic practice so it came with a couple of advantages. First of all it has this wonderful illustration on the front of it and it's just kind of made out of chipboard and stapled together. There was this wonderful gift in here though if I don't know if you can see it but the first couple of pages it seems that Sean had used this first couple of pages and then just tore them out and gave this sketchbook to me when I think I bought a commission from him or something and then on the back it has this little post-it note that just says turn undead and I just left that there. I thought that's so beautiful and for the first time in my life I was able to just fill this sketchbook with ideas and drawings and words and studies. I didn't use all of it because I really just wanted to make one of my own but I got through most of it and I'm very proud of it. So the second sketchbook that I made I made this one right here. This is again one of Sean's images that I just kind of glued to the front here and yeah I used my own I used my own grid paper for this and again just it was so easy just to carry this around in my pocket and have it for whenever I needed to take notes. I've made a few more of these and I think this one was the first hand stitched one that I made and it's holding together pretty nicely. Yeah sketchbooks make them. Something else that I have been doing for things that don't fit in sketchbooks things that are on like loose leaf pieces of paper. I just put them in this old nut jar. Let's take a look see let's see what we have. This is the map of the spheres that I was working on. What are some other things in here? This is the sheet that I was using to test out different inks on for the secret map so this was accomplished just by diluting some highlighter ink. What else do we have? I'll probably get to it later. Let's see some notes. What is this? Luckily we have I have solved this problem for myself already. Take a look at this okay so this is our big regional map. When I'm thinking about what to work on next I don't have to come up with a brand new idea because I already have so many of these evocative ideas just right here right before me on this page. For now I think I want to zoom in on this Soul Cypress Valley and see if I can't pull some kind of like ghost forest idea out of that. I have folded this paper because I want I want to remind myself not to draw any important details too close to this fold right here because that's where we're going to lose important details between the pages. To start off it's always a good idea just to kind of rough in our grid just to remind us that we are going to be working isometrically. This doesn't need to be perfect. It doesn't need to be measured. This just needs to kind of keep us from accidentally slipping out of the perspective. We've solved a lot of our initial problem of staring at this blank page right. We've already ruined it so it's no longer blank but the idea is just they aren't coming out right now so how do we solve this problem? My my secret favorite tool is just making a list write down a couple of things that sound like they would fit well in this map. That will probably get me started. There's plenty of things to draw now we just need to figure out where to put it. The best thing to do at this point break down the composition into components and think about which ones are going to take up the most room which ones need to be considered first for the overall composition. I think this river right here is going to be where we start. So something like that if we have a river maybe we have a bridge maybe that bridge is broken and I'm not trying to make any of this pretty I'm just trying to balance out this composition and make things clear and evocative. So if we have a river going through here and a bridge crossing it right here that bridge must connect to a path so rivers are also at the bottoms of hills. As a result we know that we could probably put some kind of hill or something on the opposite side of this putting taller items over here will do well. So maybe we'll put even some of these big old cypress trees kind of leading into this path right here and then maybe some creepy doors. When in doubt creepy doors. I like the idea of there are these like creepy zombie hands that are kind of always grasping around. I can imagine if you were a DM you could make all sorts of creepy voices to whatever is inside of these. Oh stay hydrated folks probably we'll have these cypress trees kind of like whipping around in the wind a little bit add a little bit of movement into it. You have the freedom if not the mandate to draw poorly at this stage in the process. What we could do is have like a fallen tree that blocks the path so you're warned before you go into the forest uh that you aren't uh you you are not by any means to leave the marked path that is no longer an option to you and and then you have to kind of go one way. It's the same thing in both directions so I need to think of something else to put over here. I think we'll put some mushrooms over here. Now because we are isometric we want to put our shorter mushrooms down here in front. Something that draws you in. Something that really uh uh makes this place seem mysterious and purposeful but also vague and evocative as Dale Kingsmill would say. I think what we'll do with this doleman is have kind of like this black fog. We'll put our ferry station over here uh this this will be good we'll have some like torches or something around here to kind of let people know there's a ferry station but again you would have to leave the road to get to it so we need to put some kind of uh other other obstacle but these will of the wisps are going to be um kind of like coming in and out and kind of swerving. I want I think I want to put some kind of like lamp rays in in in the water what what does that mean what's he up to? I'm kind of thinking what I want to do is put like a sleeping beauty snow white kind of coffin right here like a glass coffin but I don't actually think that that goes well with every all the other seeming that we have going on here but I am going to write that down in my notebook for later a prayer labyrinth so I think I'm going to put in one of those and I think we're just ready to go for for the blue pencil on the actual grid paper I think this is a really excellent start we are going to start in much the same way we started our rough pencils I have my rough pencils up here off-screen for easy reference but our angles are going to be a little bit different things scale is going to be a little bit different now that we actually have a grid in front of us but I'm going to do all of this step basically with this this and this before I forget I am going to measure where the seam in the middle is going to go that seems like a reasonably wide river to me I want my bridge to kind of go up like this so I figured because I'm basically drawing everything three times in a row that I didn't really need to explain the blue penciling I do want to bring your attention to a few changes we made from the rough pencils to the blue pencil stage now that we have an actual grid in front of us that scale is going to become very specific I did swap the places of the barrows and kind of where this sacred beast is going to be hanging out I also decided to leave this harp out of the middle of these of this mushroom ring so let's start inking I ink all in micron 05 so I don't really switch between this all that much if I have to fill in I'll use this brush pen right here I talked a lot at the beginning about how important it is to just be messy and get stuff down this phase it's important to take care and move from top left to bottom right if you can I'm right-handed so I don't want to smear over anything if you don't really know where these lines are going if you just kind of make an indistinct kind of meandery dotty line and then fill it in with hatching it'll look like you knew what you were doing all along to really achieve that sense of overlapping and depth there's this technique called haloing which is where you just leave an empty trough of white paper in between things that are overlapping so generally whatever is in front is the thing that gets completely drawn and then whatever is behind is the thing that gets abbreviated I like to do contour at the same time that I'm doing cross hatching but it really shortens the amount of time that you have to spend at your drawing table it's very easy to get discouraged and stressed out and anxious when you are inking a page and there's no undo button but don't be intimidated just keep pushing through and if you are noticed that you keep overworking something because you're not happy with it step away from it a little bit and probably just solve it by blacking it out and really making sure that those values are clear we have implied that the lighting is kind of heading from the northwest and and so we have these deep shadows on the sides of these trees and this dolmen that are facing us so we just need to make sure that we keep that consistent as we are shading the tree trunks and well you know everything else in this image it is important not only to move from the top left to the bottom right as we go to prevent smudging but it's also important to keep in mind that we need to as we ink move from foreground to background so you might look at this and see that i will oftentimes incorporate the grid into this map even though it's not a tactical map i still like to put in the grid because it it brings out the mappiness of the map it lets people know kind of where the ground is i've said what i need to do and i could stop talking about this there's always this magical moment that happens during a piece it's coming together and you've crossed the halfway point and it's just you just get in the zone after that and um boy i just love that part i don't know i get the feeling that people never get to that part sometimes like ever that bombs me out my back was telling me that it was time to call it a night so i arise first thing to get back to it i decided to add thorns amongst uh the cypress trees to the exit here um because i felt like a fallen tree you could just say well i chop it up or i hop over it it wasn't enough of an obstacle and it wasn't exciting now i've made my first real smudge my first real accident of the of the drawing um so pretty good overall but uh this one is going to be a problem so because it's crossing over this kind of torch that was going to be at this ferry station probably what i will do is just see if i can blend it into the boat with some clever hatching one of the big reasons i left the ferryman in here um i often don't like to draw characters in here um but i think the ferryman he has sort of like an eternal supernatural quality to him and it also adds this idea of verbs um into the map but not verbs so much for the player but verbs for the gm i think that's one of the big differences between tabletop rpgs and video games you need verbs both for the person who's running the game and kind of generating the fictional scenarios and you need verbs for the players who are interacting with that so we we need to equip both sides of the table so to speak with things to do things to draw from activities to engage in so as i was drawing i wrote down this note in my notebook about snow white's coffin and uh it as i was drawing as i was thinking about things i kept thinking about like what how could we make this strange it kind of made me think about something else to put on my big old map here this is why it's important to have notebooks and sketches and and working rough drafts out and available i want to do this big earthworm earthworms are of the uh i think it's phylum or or subspecies of lumber kid i'm just going to put that on on my map and i think that might be one of the next maps that we do is just like this great big snoring earthworm a big part of my creative process is funnel aesthetics things that sound fun to say like soul cypress valley is something that is is fun saying soul cypress it's so juicy um in slumbering lumber kid is uh it's another one of those it has a a meter and a poetry to it um that i feel like it or it agitates creativity within me so i wanted to write that down so i think this is done i i i think i have what i want out of this map i'm just going to go through take one final pass see if there's any line weights that need to be beefed up or values that need to be adjusted here and there um but uh i think i'm uh maybe five ten minutes away from being finished with this wouldn't you know it in five minutes on the dot basically uh boy you know that's what happens when you draw for a few decades you sort of get a sense for these things or maybe i'm just calling it quits all right well that's about it for this map so if you found something i said useful or nifty leave a like if you have any questions for me i will answer them down in the comments and maybe one day we'll meet on the old roads