Filling your World: Drawing a Naturalist’s Map
Exploring a world requires more than a sword or a bow: those who venture across its surface to admire the view and meet the strange creatures inhabiting it are travellers. What they see, they see for themselves. They are not explorers. For that lofty title, one must do more than see - one must record, pursue, and, most importantly, understand. For a worldbuilder, it can be tempting to allow your story to stop at the travellers’ comprehension. To use their assumptions and understandings to fill in the gaps before you move on. But if you want to do more than tread water when filling your world, it’s not as daunting a task as it may seem.
Welcome, adventurers, to another Red Quills mapmaking and worldbuilding tutorial: my name is Ryan of the Red Quills, and I will be your guide today as we discuss creating one of the most striking kinds of map - the drawing of a naturalist’s map. In this post, I will go over the processes for drawing the map, creating the flora and fauna, sketching those organisms, writing compelling notes, and bringing them all together into one foxy illustration.
This tutorial is a part of this week’s topic, which is How to Draw a Naturalist’s Map. We’ll be going through the step-by-step of the map today, but if you want more information on the worldbuilding specifics, you can check out the Shorts series releasing this week on our Channel here.
You can also check out our other Journal entries here.
We’ve gone over some variations on the common map in tutorials leading up to this: while I spent most of February going over different kinds of maps of the realm - maps showing the different maneouvres and boundaries in war, maps showing trade routes and economic information, and maps that delve into magic and history - I have more recently been exploring more site-specific maps. Illustrated maps, stylised city maps, and last week we discussed building plans and blueprints for our Heist Maps topic.
But this week we’re going to whole new heights: normally, I attempt to show you how you can create a map even when you have little to no experience or skill in illustrating. The process is quite simple, if laborious, and it is much more important to be deliberate than flowery. This map, however, does require some art skills. I will go into the processes that I’ve used, and I am sure than anyone - regardless of experience or what people insist is an in-built artistic talent - can do what I have done if they practise and apply themselves.
I have also started receiving comments asking why I bother with these maps, as they are too time-consuming to warrant making for an RPG. To that, I say ‘balderdash’. This map, of the Drifting Isle, is a gift for my partner. It is a location of significance in the world that she and our friends are exploring, in the dungeons and dragons game that I run.
But I’m getting off track.
Let’s start at the beginning, with a blank sheet of paper. As always, I am using a sheet of blank A2 paper. Now, we’re going to be using watercolours to create our illustrations, so we need a thicker sheet of paper. This paper is 240gsm, so quite thick, and while I can’t because of my filming setup, I would recommend that you tape yours down so that the paper doesn’t buckle with the moisture.
I start with a sketch. In this case, as you can see, what I’ve done is divide my piece of paper into roughly the golden ratio - artists love it, for some reason - and used that ratio to determine the different sections of my map. As this is a map of the Drifting Isle, I’ll need: an overview map, which will be the largest section of the page; a side view of the Isle, which will be next in size; a great deal of explanatory text in the blank areas; and I’ve created seven circles in which I will paint the flora and fauna of the Isle.
Terrain and Flora
I start with the watercolouring on the page: I’ve got seven circles of flora and fauna to do, and then I’ll paint the surface of the water blue on the overhead and side views of the Isle, because we’re committing to this aesthetic. Now, quite apart from the practicalities of how to paint in watercolour, which I’ll talk about briefly in a moment, there’s a couple of things to remember about using watercolours in mixed media.
Firstly, if you have a pencil sketch underneath your watercolour, it can become difficult to erase the pencil after painting. This may seem obvious to some, but it’s worth noting. I’ll be tidying up the pencil lines later, but the lines visible under the paint will remain there. There are ways to remove pencil from under watercolours, but as a general rule, just make it easy on yourself.
Secondly, I’m using a UniPen fineliner for this work today - which is a solid pen to use, and I would recommend them, the full equipment list is in the description - but if you are using any kind of pen with watercolour, make sure that the ink is not water soluble. Otherwise it will blend with the watercolour.
You could also just wait for the paint to dry before adding the ink.
What I’ve done here is pencilled a quick sketch: I’ve formed a complete image of what I want to paint in my mind before putting pencil to paper. I’ve used simple shapes to block it on the page, and added the important texture details briefly. Then I’ve mostly erased it, so that I won’t need to erase later from under the watercolours.
I prep the paper by painting it with a light layer of water, to help me blend the watercolours, and then I start adding some colours.
It’s worth noting here that I’m not exactly a watercolour painter myself. Anyone who watches my videos knows that I work in ink and pencil a lot, and I’m a fair oil painter. But watercolours is something I’m still working on myself. And I say this not to play down what the final product is going to look like, but to encourage you to try it yourself. There’s no such thing as a person that can’t create art.
That being said, I do try to learn as I’m doing, and I’ve done a bit of experimenting in these paintings to teach myself. Mostly it worked great, but that last illustration - of the firespitter, a kind of land-based coral - is a bit derpy.
In watercolours, you start by adding the lighter colours first, and working darker and darker. You can see that that is what I’m doing all through these illustrations. Pencil sketch first, light layers of watercolour, add more detail with darker colours, and then we’ll finally use a fineliner at the end to give it some definition. Because I want the paint to dry before I ink it, I’ll paint all of them, do some other work, and then come back to ink it.
Content Creation
So now we’ve gone over the process of sketching them, I’ll talk a little about how I sit down and come up with the ideas of the creatures that I’ve added in, so that you can use them in your own worlds as well. That’s the purpose of these kinds of maps, after all: they are supposed to give inspiration, insight, and interest into a completely different place and perspective.
So let’s talk about the Drifting Isle and its flora and fauna.
The Location and its Genre
When you create a world of your own, you will create it with a genre. You may not mean to, you may not be aware of it, but everyone’s created worlds reflect, in some way, their creator. So if you’re writing a high fantasy world, where everyone has good in them somewhere and there is one source of evil that corrupts the world, then that’s going to inform what it’s like to live on the ground there. Similarly, if you explore a mist-filled pocket dimension where people who die always awaken the following morning with no memory of their deaths and strange wraiths reach out of the darkness to claim you, then that’s going to have very different flora and fauna.
So ask yourself, what’s the genre of your world? If you hate answering questions like that because of an ingrained response to high school, just ask yourself what book or film series it’s most like.
For instance, the Drifting Isle, here is the body of an ancient, eldritch creature, perpetually floating through the high seas in a bank of fog. It has a Lovecraftian vibe to it, and I’m going for a surrealist horror kind of genre.
Choosing a Base Organism
So, once you’ve got your genre, that can help you to figure out what kind of base organisms you’ve got going on. For this map, I tried to make a fairly wide variety of creatures - so I have a tree, a bush, a grass, a fungus, a seaweed, a coral, and a bird. Not a large number of fauna, it has to be said, but that’s because of the nature of the Isle. Jot down a list of the kinds of flora and fauna you want to explore, and don’t crowd it with too many of the one type.
Here’s a basic list:
- A tree
- A bush or shrub
- A bird
- A small mammal
- An insect, arachnid, or mollusc
- A fungus
You can use the genre of your world to help you to identify a real-world example of this creature in a setting that you want to emulate. If you’re in an untamed, low fantasy world, your tree can be a redwood. If you’re out in a horrifying magical wilderness, your fungus can be a devil’s tooth mushroom.
You’ve got your base organism, now we can make it your own.
Adding Some Variations
There’s a rule in improv acting, summed up in the phrase: “Yes, and…” The idea is that when you’re making something up on the fly with a group of people, you should never shut down an idea. You should take that idea and add to it. It’s a good rule to have in many creative endeavours, and it’s one I recommend for this one too.
When you’ve chosen a base for one of your flora or fauna, you can then take that base and make it your own by adding on a new characteristic or exaggerating one of its existing characteristics in response to the genre of your world.
For instance, let’s take one of the flora I’ve made for the Drifting Isle here, the ‘Reachers’. They are a kind of fungus - a capped mushroom that springs up on the drier surfaces of the Isle. There are a great many strange and gruesome mushrooms in the world, and many of them look like creatures or organs themselves, so I dug deeper into the Lovecraftian genre of my setting and made them look like hands, with sharp, blood-red nails.
There are already a huge number of mushrooms that look like body parts: I won’t waste anyone’s time by listing them, but it’s frankly horrifying. I’ve just pushed that aesthetic past a similarity to a body part - in this case, a human hand - and into looking exactly like a human hand.
I’ve ‘Yes, and’-ed the mushroom.
Creating a Context
So you’ve chosen a base organism, you’ve added on one or more characteristics to make it more suitable for your world, more strange and imagination-sparking than before. Now you can create some context for it.
It already exists in your world: there may be an origin story for it, a use for it in the culinary or artisanal arenas, or some folk tales about it. Your naturalist’s map is the perfect place to add that in - not too much, just enough to spark the imagination.
Later in this post, I’ll go into the actual note-taking process and what I’ve done there. But in this case, I’ll just read what this map says about the Reachers: “Figure 3. Reachers. Extremely Dangerous. The crew is wary of the hand-funguses, these ‘reachers’: one of their number thought it funny, when we first landed, to shake hands with one. He died yesterday, covered in hand-like protrusions and bloody fingernails.”
Add in a first-hand (aha) account of an interaction around the organism in question to give it more depth and realism.
Sketches and Styles
While we’re here, I’m going to talk quickly about the three kinds of sketch that I have in this map and why your naturalists’ maps - or, really, any map that delves into one specific natural location in depth - should have these three.
Obviously, in this case, my map is focused on the natural habitat created on this strange, wyrd island. But in my other site-specific maps, of which I have another coming out next week, they still have all three in some form or another.
And remember, no one will get anywhere by putting down their own skills. You are capable of doing everything that I’m doing here. Take the time, think it through, and keep going until you’re finished. If you don’t like the final result, that’s actually a good thing! It means you have an idea of what you want to focus on in the next map.
Functional Map
Every map - and I’m honestly not entirely sure why I have to say this, other than completeness - must contain a map. Does that scan? Every map must have a map. Not a sketch, not an illustration, a map. An easy-to-read graphical representation of the terrain and its landmarks.
A map must be to a consistent scale. It must contain accurate information. It must be usable for the people on the ground. If your map does not contain a map, then it’s not a map. It’s an illustration.
Ground-Level View
Now, I know that maps can be impassive, unemotional, unaesthetic things. I don’t mean that, I love maps. But I know that other people can think that. So if your top-down map does not scratch the itch you have for a more stylised, aesthetic representation of your world, then consider adding in a ground-level view.
Not only is this illustration more aesthetic, it’s also useful! Remember that the purpose of a map is to help you when you get lost. An accurate ground-level view is actually useful in helping a person to find their location, as long as you mark where the sketch location is.
Individual Sketches
Last is the individual sketches. In this case, they are the watercolour paintings of the flora and fauna. In other maps, I’ve done coin-sized illustrations of landmarks or views. They’re to give the reader the impression of what it is like on the ground.
You can sketch organisms, views, people, coins, sigils, flags, or anything that you desire. The sketches are your chance to really focus on what the people will be seeing as they move around your world.
Make it Presentable
We can see now that the basic shape of the map is coming together. Like a lot of my site-specific maps, I’ve left a great deal of blank space between my illustrations and in the bottom right corner - where you can see I’ve made a nice little watercoloured title - so that I can add in the notes later on. Notes are a crucial part of a naturalist's sketches, and I really wanted to make this map feel like a genuine explorer’s journaling.
I’ve used a couple of techniques in this map to try to make it presentable and come together towards the end. It’s worth noting that while I am very happy with the end result, there are a few things that I will change when I do the next iteration of it. It’s the same with any artwork, I think: there’s no such thing as a perfect piece.
But here are some basic rules to remember as you’re making your own maps and worldbuilding sketches. If you’re looking at your work and thinking ‘It’s missing something’ or ‘Something’s not working’, look at these three points:
Consistency
Whatever you do, you must be consistent when you’re doing them. That is to say, commit to the work. In this piece, I’ve gone for a much more chaotic style - the Drifting Isle is a focus of weirdness and a kind of organic horror, so it follows that a map of the site will have some of that chaos bleed through. It does mean that I need to strike a balance between mess and readability, though.
But for your work, be consistent: if you choose to go for an orderly look, commit to it. Rule out your guidelines or grids, make sure your distancing is meticulous. If you choose to use a medium or style in one area, make sure that you apply that rule consistent. For instance, I watercoloured the title here - I think this map could be improved if I painted the titles for the overhead view and the side view as well, but I didn’t think of that until after.
Balance
Think of the balance of your piece as the ability for the eye to break it down and digest it. Often in the real world, maps are made without much thought to how easily they can be digested: the cartographers in question simply take out a pre-assigned area and sketch it out as accurately as they can. But if you’re making one from scratch, you have the opportunity to make things easier and more aesthetic for the viewer.
Balance in this case exists in the detail, colour, or composition of image versus writing. Creating a balance between the three of them will draw more attention to your work.
Content
What is the content of your map? Simply put, is it worth the time and effort you’ve put into it? Generally speaking, the answer is always. Any map is a good map, if you can read it and learn from it. But if you look at your map and think that it needs something more, than it probably does need something more.
You want your maps to tell a story. It may be a boring story, one about mountains and rivers and cities, but that’s the kind of story that a map is suited to tell. If it seems blank and bland, try adding in some of the illustrations or notes that we’ve discussed.
Notes in the Margins
Alright, the last point here: writing the notes in the margins. It’s a staple of explorers’ maps, and it can really elevate the worldbuilding that you are working with. I’d recommend adding in some scrawled notes into any of your maps for your fantasy world: unless your protagonists have gotten themselves a brand-new, crystal-clean map straight off the printer, what’s to stop it from having the scribbles of its previous owner, to explain to the reader some of the nuance of your world?
So, there are really two kinds of notes that you can find on maps: official and unofficial. Official notes will concern things like details that the map is too crowded to convey or clearing up potential misunderstandings about scale or confused areas. Unofficial notes are where things get interesting. Let’s discuss, and I’ll use this map of the Drifting Isles to illustrate. All of the notes are written by its author, Cornelius de Marr, in first person, but they do contain these three kinds of unofficial notes:
Expository: Historical, Mythological, or Cultural
The wider-scale notes that you’ll find on any map. A lot of the time, these can be official notes, written in the legend or a specific text box. That’s what I do for a fair number of my maps, if you’ve watched my other posts. But these can give context to some of the details that are too general for a member of the public to randomly spout out.
For instance, in the top of this map, Cornelius writes: “I had heard the tales, of course, of the Drifting Isle. Some claimed that it was an ancient whale-like creature, swimming with a forest on its back. Others posited that it was some kind of pumice outcrop, a stone light enough to float. But when my ship stopped at the Isle, I remember the stories that our grandmother used to tell us at night: of a creature from the dawn of the world, large enough to swallow a fleet of ships. The Leviathan.”
This contains no small amount of information about the mythological and cultural landscape of the society from which Cornelius hails. And it gives a lot of insight into the Drifting Isles too.
Explanatory: Terrain, Landmark, or Organism
This is a naturalist’s map, and so it will contain more notes than usual on the explanatory side: the notes will go into the strict reality of what one can expect in different areas, talking to different people, dealing with the local flora and fauna. They’re handy for the traveller, and writing them on the map is a great place to store things that one may forget.
So, Cornelius has filled this map with his observations, but he writes: “These kelp fronds may be among the least dangerous flora of the Isle, but they do seem ominous, waving in the shallows. I am not certain, but I believe that the hook-like growths are some kind of ovipositor. This is not a theory that I wish to test.”
Insight, direction, and warning in one.
Experiential: Logs, Observations, or Memories
These notes on this map are all written in the first person, and so they sound like they are all a part of this category. And they are, mostly. But experiential notes deal more specifically with memories and moments, rather than simply being first-person.
A map found at an abandoned campsite may contain the scrawled accounts of a traveller trying to find a buried treasure. They marked each day they spent in a different location - where they went, what they looked for, what they encountered. Less general, more specific.
In this case, the most experiential notes on this map are: “My brother has headed ashore to speak with the inhabitant of that lone hut on the rock. I have stayed with the ship to sketch this wyrd place. But the more I do, the more weirdness is revealed to me...”
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We’re finishing up now, you can see the final version of the map coming together above. Now, I do have a few notes for how it turned out: as always, I gave myself less than eight hours to finish it all, and I ran out of time. I think that it would be improved by cramming every available space with notes, and I may in my own time, but overall I’m very happy with how it turned out.
What do you think of the map? I’d be keen to hear whether you would find this to be a useful worldbuilding and immersion tool. I’ll be giving it to my players in-game to help them to learn more about the Drifting Isle and the Leviathan.
As always, the full A2 version of this map is available on my Journal, in a separate post. Thank you to all of my supporters. If you want me to talk more about a specific point, or if you have questions, feel free to comment them below, I try to reply to every question.
Good luck, adventurers, and I’ll see you next week.