Hey folks, I wanted to do a quick tutorial for creating city maps.

I used Krita for this tutorial, which is a free, open source art program made by artists for artists. I highly recommend it!

I started by doing a quick sketch of a small group of buildings. This can be done on paper and scanned, or digitally. I’ve done both before.

Then I removed the background and did a simple two tone shading on the buildings. The shading can wait till later if you want a more accurate look, but it’s faster to do it this way.

Then, go nuts and cut, copy, and paste those buildings over and over in different patterns like I’ve done here. For very large cities, like Erenan, you can cut and paste larger and larger chunks as you expand. As you’re doing this, try to envision streets and the placement of important buildings. This is by far the most important step. It’s also here that you can see why you might want to add the shading later, since it sometimes gets on the wrong side as you rotate buildings around.

After that, I added a simple color overlay to make the wood and stone pop, and lastly, added some simple greenery to pull the whole thing together.

And that’s it! My next step would be to pull the finished image into PowerPoint to add some textboxes as labels, but I’ll leave that for you to do!