It’s a fair statement to say that I cannot draw. I did it exactly once,
for a joke video, and I think we'd all be better off to never see that again.
However, while I'm hopelessly outgunned on a drawing tablet, artistry can take many forms,
and I have what I like to think is a decent design sense. In my free time I doodle up flags,
make video-game cases, and mockup entire Lego architecture sets — but on the channel, what I
lack in drawing talent, I make up for in Maps. I happen to think they're pretty neat, and seeing
as I'm often asked how I make them, I guess I'm not the only one. So, to peek into the proverbial
workshop and see how these lovely pieces of cartography come to life, Let's Do Some Mapmaking!
Step 1 is invariably figuring out where on earth we’re actually going for this, and today the
answer is Egypt. Great. Alright, step 2: We need a base. I’m going to fire up a nifty piece of NASA
software called G-Projector, which lets us set the globe on whatever angle we’d like. I can sometimes
get away with grabbing a blank map template from online, and Wikipedia has great high-res files,
but in this case we need the big guns. After some fiddling, everything looks nice,
so I save the file, and off to step 3: Photoshop, Part 1, where we take this monochrome grey bleugh
and separate out what’s land and what’s water. That’s right, kiddos, we’re playing God.
Now our land is bright, our seas are dark, we’ve diligently erased the Suez Canal from
existence to establish historical authenticity, and we’re off to our third program: Wonderdraft.
Much like with G-Projector, we are distinctly not using Wonderdraft for its intended purpose,
because most people use it to make swishy fantasy maps. What I’m doing, literally the only reason
we’re here, is to add mountains. Is it extra? Yes. Unnecessary? Probably. But.. aesthetic as hell?
Kinda is. Wonderdraft takes our blank base, reads what’s land and what’s water, and spits out a map
of its own, upon which we can go to town. I’ve got a topographic map of the area on another window
so that I can be sure I’m actually putting stuff in the right places, but really this part is just
clicking. Once I’m satisfied with my terraforming, it’s back to Photoshop to get us across the line.
Again, we’ll isolate the land from the waves, but now that the mechanical part of the map
is basically done, everything on top of this is aesthetic window dressing and playing with layer
effects. First, we’ll thicken up the outlines, then copy that and gaussian blur it a few times
to make a nice shadow layer around the coasts and rivers. Then, it obviously wouldn’t be an OSP map
if it wasn’t drenched in marble, so I’ve got a high-res texture here that goes over the land with
a clipping mask, but it’s on a couple different layer-combine modes with partial opacity, so we
can still see those mountains I bought an entire program just to add. For the water, the base is of
course still marble (you know me), but marble for water doesn’t immediately make sense. So, I add
one extra layer which will: tint the marble blue, bring in some nice water highlights, and pull a
subliminal trick to make the design make sense: I add a swimming pool. But it works! The texture has
those iconic tiny square tiles which aesthetically registers as swimming pool, distinguishes it from
the land texture, and connects why marble would be underwater. And with that clever little trick,
we’ve got ourselves a map! If this were for, say, classical Greece, I’d recolor it orange
and black to look like a vase painting, but for this one, we’re keeping it simple.
Now… we can doodle on it. Depending on what time period I’m working with and what I want to show,
I draw in different territories. This is undoubtedly the fiddliest and lowest-tech
part of the process, because I go online to some of my favorite cartographers on YouTube,
search “Egypt History Map”, take some screenshots, and trace ‘em on. I’ve got
a few channels that I trust to get it right, and there are useful tools online like GeaCron,
but things don’t always line up, so it takes some critical thinking and decisions on my end about
what I think actually goes where. This is why I use a soft-edge brush to hand-waive the ambiguity
when drawing on borders. I go in afterwards and clean up my edges, but the reality is that
we don’t know how far these territories really extended, so all pre-modern cartography is a game
of well-reasoned approximations. Then, rinse and repeat step-EhhhIDon’tReallyKnowIStoppedCounting-
anywhere from 5 to 50 times, and them’s the maps for the video!
So that, dear viewer, is how it happens! Map design, like any art form, is an iterative
process, and it most certainly did not come out of the gate in top form. Won’t like, a few of
them’ll burn to look at for too long, but you can definitely see the progression from “I just
discovered these softwares and am very confused, please send help” to getting more comfortable with
outlining, shading, and texturing, adding mountains, learning that de-saturation is
sometimes a virtue, and finally landing at how they look today. Beyond just being shiny
and marble, they’re a critical teaching tool in my videos, because dealing in units of centuries
and taking big picture perspectives on history requires some big pictures. Maps can show how
states evolve over time, sure, but they can also present civilizations at a glance. It’s a scale
we basically never see with our own eyes, and I think that’s really cool! … Also It’s Marble!
Thank you so much for watching! After a very busy past few months I needed a bit
of a breather between videos, so I hope you enjoyed this little behind-the-scenes look.
Regular content will resume next week, so I’ll see you all in the next video!