 Welcome to MAPCRO, the RPG art show. My name is Kyle, and this video is brought to you by the old road scene. It's a collection of maps, and if you would like to get your hands on it, you can check the description below. Today, I give you the coward's guide to watercolor painting maps. For this map, I used designer gouache from Windsor Newton and artistic grade gouache for my titanium white. Some derwent watercolor pencils. Some master's touch white acrylic paint. Some cheap brushes for the acrylic and some nice Richardson sable brushes for the watercolor. An empty Prismacolor pencil box for my palette. Some paper towels. And some Strathmore cold press 140 pound watercolor paper. I'm not a painter. I enjoy painting, and so when I do paint, I take very tiny steps and try out little things here and there, and just get darker and more confident as I go. We kind of ease into it. That is why this is the coward's guide to painting. I've never painted an isometric map before. I've drawn plenty, but I've never painted one. So I figured let's start by practicing the basics. Mountains, forests, plains, and rivers. As a draftsman, I am comforted by the solid nature of lines that's uncompromising. It's clear. With painting, I don't have that kind of line work. What I have is color. I have form. I have light direction. I have warm colors and cool colors. It's just a lot more to balance. With a pencil or a pen, you just have to kind of structure out the value. But when you're painting, you have to balance all of this. So I try to balance as little as possible at a time. For my watercolor palette, I am going with a triad of Spectrum Red, Primary Blue, and Permanent Yellow Deep. If you're just starting out with gouache, I do recommend the Windsor Newton Designer gouache set. It's not the cheapest set out there, but it's not too expensive. However, I would supplement this with titanium white and some black from Windsor Newton's professional set. It's going to be more expensive, but it really helps. What you see on my palette now is all that I'm using. You really don't need too much to make a painting. But we are also going to use some watercolor pencils later. I started watercolor painting just last year learning from the videos of James Gurney. I have a link in the description below. His advice is to start with the largest brush you have, and then only go down in size of brush when you absolutely need to. For the forests and plains in the foreground, I'm going to start with a desaturated yellow-green, and I'm going to put a lot of water in with the pigments to make sure that it doesn't dry too strong. For the forests, I start dabbing in some blues and purples to make things darker. I very rarely want to add black to make a color darker until you absolutely have to deepen that value past what you can do with purple and blue. I want to make the grasslands beyond the mountains stand out a little bit more and seem further distant, so I'm going to make them sort of a brighter yellow than the foreground. I mix up some gray for the mountains by mostly using blue and then throwing in a little bit of orange by mixing the other two colors into it. Now, we're just kind of blocking in the colors now. It doesn't really need to look that great, and if things start running a little bit, just use some paper towel or dab off your brush on the paper towel and kind of suck up whatever is running with your brush. Normally, when watercoloring, it's going to be really important to protect your high values. Let that white of the paper show through, plan out what you're doing, but this is the coward's way and we're going to use white acrylic for that later. Bring your whole painting up to the same level of finish before getting into more detail. I'm going to start laying in some nice cool shadows into the mountains. I'm going to try to keep in mind the direction of that light, but again, we're going to use acrylic to fix things later if we make any mistakes, so you don't have to worry about it too much. When planning out your shadows, it's usually a good idea to have, say, your mountain covered in 75% shadow or 25% shadow. This keeps you from falling into symmetry and things that look unnatural. It makes you commit to a direction. I start stippling in some shadows for the forest so I can start figuring out the shape of this forest and the value composition. This will help me keep it from kind of turning into a big kind of monocolor blob and give it some form, some character and interest. I've laid out where the river is going to go with a very light shadow and then I start bringing in some of this more golden green for where these plains and pasture lands are going to go. These things turned out to be a lot trickier than I thought they were going to be and I would probably approach it much more differently next time. That said, I really like how the color turned out and I continue to use the stippling technique to add some interest in form and keep it from just turning into a big, you know, flat area of color. I bring in a rusty green yellow for the canopy of the forest. This probably ended up being a little deeper in value than I wanted it to be, but it turned out okay. It's important to keep your highlights warm and your shadows cool. This is because the sun is yellow and casts a warm light and the reflected light from the blue sky makes the shadows blue. Now because this is the coward's guide, I am going to start cheating. I'm going to bring in some watercolor pencils to get that fine control that I'm used to with my pens and pencils. We're going to use Prussian blue because we don't want to go to black. We don't want to blow out our values so quickly and we still want to start building up those cool temperatures in the shadows. Switching over to the forest, I start stippling in some highlighted trees with a yellow watercolor pencil. I'm stippling in the shapes of these upward arches to indicate that the trees are growing up out of the tops of hills. We start laying in some shadows behind those yellow strokes with Prussian blue again. This is going to help give this definition to these hills, to these clusters of trees. These pencils aren't completely opaque and they are mixing together in your eye. Yellow and blue are going to make green. For the river, let's get out our Prussian blue again and very, very carefully kind of move back and forth. You don't have to be really strong or confident with this. Just kind of like very slight zig-zags baby your way through this. You don't have to be super committal or confident with these strokes to begin with. Then I bring in some tan and start on these grasslands. I really like how they look in the footage and I wish I kind of would have kept with this and kind of keeping the tops of these hills darker than the bottoms of these hills. I start laying in some more yellow to get that bright sunlight highlight that I'm looking for, that bright saturation. Then I start in with that Prussian blue again and my goodness I've just kind of made a giant bruise instead of a grassland but I think we managed to fix it later. Coming in with a bright blue pencil, I mark out more confidently where that river is going to be and I try to put it on the right side of that shadowed line that we put in there to make it look like it is sitting at the bottom of a hill, kind of in the trough where a river would be. Now back to our mountains, I come in with a tan and I just couldn't keep myself from making some line work to define the edges of these mountains. This isn't very painterly of me but that hit of that kind of off-white is really helping to bring in the warmth of those highlights in a way that the white of the paper just wasn't. I start laying in some purple into the lower parts of the shadows, those deepest parts of the values but it wasn't quite dark enough for me so I did start adding some black after that. With my black pencil, I also start to lay in some deeper shadows on the left side of the river to give it some more definition. I bring in some more yellows for the highlights in the planes and then start making some purple shadows in the middle of that. Purple is yellow's complement so it just adds some vibrance into those areas. I add some water to my brush and start pushing it around to soften some of those shapes and blend those colors. I don't really like this effect but again, we do have some recourse later on to fix the value problems here. I start laying in some shadows for the clouds on the other side of the mountain and then I hit them with some blue pencil and start laying in some gold on those planes below. I load my brush with some water and start blending in some of those harsher lines in the clouds. I lose a lot of those highlights but we're going to bring them back in with acrylics in just a second. Not only do I fill in the clouds with some white acrylic but I also hit some of those reflections coming off of the surface of the river and also the tops of the hills. Putting whites on the tops of the hills did help define them and if you have to pick one, choose value over hue. It's going to make things more clear but I'm not super happy about this and I'm definitely going to experiment with other ways to draw hills in the future. I use a cheap cruddy brush without any water in it to kind of dab onto the tops of the hills to make it more irregular. I really didn't like that I could see the brushstrokes. It just felt too even and not grassy enough. I stipple in some red flowers into the planes on both sides of the mountain just to add a little bit more color and variety and interest. I also break up the shadow underneath the clouds with some Prussian blue zigzags. Here is the final scanned image. I went ahead and added some grid lines and a compass rose with vector art in Photoshop. You can download a high res version of this map if you want to take a closer look at the details. I beg you not to but I won't stop you. This video topic was a suggestion from subscriber Eric. Thank you Eric so much for suggesting this. This was a real challenge for me but also a lot of fun. Also, I put this topic up for a vote with several other topic ideas over on my Twitter so go ahead and give me a follow there if you would like to be involved in future polls. If you would like me to do another video on watercolor painting maps, let me know in the comments below. If you heard something useful or nifty, leave me a like and maybe subscribe and maybe one day I'll see you on the old roads. Until then, farewell.