 Welcome to Map Crow, the RPG art show. My name is Kyle, and today we are talking about how to make cloth maps! This episode is brought to you by my secret map backers from the Old Broads campaign. The map I'm showing you is exclusively available to those who backed at the secret map level, but I can still show you how I made this map and all the cool features that go with it. You see, under a black light, you can see magical rooms that are almost impossible to see when the black light is not directly on them. The first step is to print out your image horizontally flipped onto some iron-on fabric transfer sheets. Double check to make sure you know which side of your paper the printer is going to print onto. For the map, I'm going to be using unbleached duck cloth, and that is what the image is going to be transferred onto. The duck cloth has already been washed and ironed, and it's completely dry. And I wish I could tell you that this is the easy part, but I got this wrong so many times. This is literally the last fabric transfer sheet that I had. I followed the instructions as closely as I could, but there was always like little bits that were sticking to the transfer paper instead of the cloth. But if you kind of really double check all of the instructions and make sure that you are heating the entire paper as evenly as possible, but not too much, you might get lucky and this will turn out. Now the end product I think is worth figuring this out, but if you're planning on nailing this the first time, you might be in for some frustration. I'm leaving in all of the footage of this ironing as exciting as it is, just so you know exactly like how to flip the iron around and how long to actually keep the iron on the surface. It might be worth experimenting with different brands. For this round, I was using Jolie's boutique Easy Image and I wasn't super happy with it, but I don't know for a fact that any other brand is going to do all that much better. It's really important to make sure you get around the edges and not just hit the middle of the sheet so much. Once you're finished, kind of fan it off until it's cool enough to touch and then carefully peel off the sheet. I hope you have better luck than I did, but when it turns out well, gosh, it just looks beautiful. There is this coating that has transferred over along with the image to the fabric. It's going to have a very different texture, but this is good because if you cut around this texture, it's going to keep the edges of your map from fraying like they will if you just kind of leave the edges of the canvas alone. Now for the cool part, we're going to need some Mod Podge and the felt of a highlighter marker that has been diluted in warm water. Before you start cutting open highlighters, make sure that they actually react to black light. Next, we're going to mix together the highlighter solution with the Mod Podge in about a one-to-one ratio until it has the consistency of a kind of runny acrylic paint. Now it's the nerve-wracking part. It's time to stipple on the letters to the canvas with a toothpick. I found that using a brush just wasn't getting me the fine detail that I really wanted to get these letters correctly, so I went with a toothpick instead. Again, for this fine control with a somewhat difficult to use solution that we've made, I'm using a stippling motion with the toothpick to get that kind of control. It's very slow going, but I wouldn't really want to go too much faster than this anyway. Once our invisible paint has dried, it's very difficult to see if anything is there, and you certainly won't be able to read anything until you turn on the black light, in which case they really do shine out. It's not going to be quite as bright as when you first apply it, but it's still very readable under a black light. Ever since I was a kid and I first read The Hobbit, where the map of Erebor has these secret moon letters on it, I've been obsessed with this idea of running a game that actually has kind of like these secret coded messages that can only be read under certain circumstances, and I think that would just be a really fascinating prop to bring into a game. You wouldn't be able to use this kind of thing for like a hex crawl necessarily, because of the limits of what you can actually do with iron-ons, but man, if you have just like one specific map that you're doing this with, I got to imagine it would just blow your player's minds once they find out exactly the nature of this map that they've been handling for, you know, a couple of sessions already, when you turn on that black light, and suddenly there's a whole other set of clues to uncover. That's it for this episode, I think. Thanks everyone for watching, and thank you everyone for helping me reach my goal of getting 1,000 followers. I only started this at the end of February, and already we've kind of reached this milestone, and that just means the world to me. Maybe not the next video, but soon coming up on MapCrow, I'm going to do a postmortem on how I ran the Xenquest Kickstarter for the Old Roads, and kind of the process for designing all the components, and what maybe I would do differently next time. If you have a topic that you would like me to talk about in the meantime, or afterwards, let me know in the comments below. So, until next time, maybe I'll see you on the Old Roads. Farewell.