A couple days ago I posted the WIP map of the Haliyzin wasteland I’ve been working on to /r/worldbuilding, and it got a hugely positive response as well as a couple requests for a tutorial! And because it makes me very excited when people want to learn how to do what I spend my free time doing, here it is.

As a forenote: I usually use a Wacom Intuos 4 tablet for all my digital painting, but because I want this to be accessible to the largest amount of people, everything done in this tutorial will be done with a crappy LED mouse.

First, I opened up a new canvas (it can be any size, but a smaller one — 600×600-800×800 might be easier for a trial run) and filled it with an eyeburning-in-hindsight shade of turquoise. It’s water, so change it depending on the mineral content of your fictional world’s oceans and the colour of its atmosphere.

The landmass is made with Photoshop’s default chalk brushes. I took a fairly large size, opened up brush properties (folder-with-brushes icon next to the brush picker) and set size jitter and angle jitter to their max; and turned on a moderate amount of scattering. This is good for quickly laying out the shape of your land and giving its coastline an irregular shape.

I encourage you to play around with everything in brush properties — the more times you alter your brush, the more diverse and interesting your landscape will be.

Then I do pretty much the same thing with an eraser — forming a landscape entirely additively will often make it look too soft, or like someone just dumped piles of sand into the water. Think of it as sculpting, not drawing.

With an eraser you can etch details, bays, waterways (I am a fan of estuaries), etc, and give more texture to your coasts and peninsulas.

If you’re totally boned on ideas, take a look at some Earth maps and pay lots of attention to where different landmarks are formed.

After shaping the land, I like to colourize it with big and/or scattery brushes to get a feel for where my beaches/deserts/forests/whatever are going. You can also trace outlines for cities and play around with different layer modes (where it says “normal” on your layer window — see what the rest of those options do) to make canyons, mountains, or rolling land with overlay/soft light/multiply/screen layers.

• To mask one layer to another like I’ve done here, alt+click between the two. The top layer is now bound to the bottom layer and you can scribble and be messy without worrying about going over the boundaries of your land.
• Alt+clicking on a layer will do an alpha select. I’ve done an alpha selection of the island and filled the selection with dark brown on a layer underneath it. This gives it a more dimensional coastline.

Now, find some satellite photos to mask on. I discovered MODIS through celoyd on Reddit (thanks again!) — they’ve got awesome high-resolution satellite photos with no markers or watermarks. They’re also public domain, so you don’t need to lie and say of course you’d never steal Google Maps images.

For this tutorial, I’m using the photo of Azerbaijan that was linked to me, because I’m still figuring out MODIS’s interface.

Once you’ve opened up your photo or pasted it into your file, find an area that resembles the land you’re looking for and make a selection. Generally, bigger is better because you will be erasing the sharp edges to blend it into the surrounding images.

After copying the selection into a masked layer, I play around with levels, hue/saturation, colour balance, channels, and everything else found under edit>adjustments.

• Canyon walls and mountain ranges can make great coastlines (as well as actual coastline, of course) but be very, very gentle when using transform>warp (ctrl+t, right click on selection) and liquify (filter>liquify) because if you hamfist it, your map will look like someone melted it.

Keep layering cut-outs of your source maps, alter them so the colour match, and either

- erase along the sharp edges with a very soft brush to blend it

- erase around geographic markers (ie, along the perimeter of a crack or other natural border)

- or do a layer mask (the button at the bottom of the layer window that looks like a circle in a square).

If done right, the landscape will look seamless.

• Keep in mind that environmental factors like prevailing winds, water currents, tectonic plates, etc give each landscape a distinct grain, sort of like a plank of wood. You might be able to distinguish this from your source maps, and it just adds an extra layer of believability if you ensure everything’s running in the same direction. Likewise, there are always flaws and irregularities, so don’t go too overboard matching everything up.

Close enough.

The more you work on it, the cooler it’ll look. There’s really no limit on how much time you can spend adding little details (maybe you want to go totally overboard and lay out every building in a city). Personally, I find them a lot of fun because I can open up my maps whenever I want and add new details, landmarks, or whatever.

Here are some other things you might want to do depending on how involved you want to get:

• Putting desert, canyon, or maybe even forests on very low-opacity layers underneath the main land layer will help give your water more dimension; it’ll look translucent, like you can see the sea floor.
• You can use low-opacity overlay and soft light layers to tint or add definition to parts of your map. Maybe you want to make half your forest blue and half violet, or maybe you just want to darken the area around a river so it looks like it’s running through a valley — soft light layers can also be used to tint areas the same colour so they blend together better.
  
• Heavy-forested areas are finicky, because they’ll start to look like ghost forests if you just blend them with a soft eraser. For filling large areas, you can make a careful selection of a chunk of forest, copy it several times into your image and use soft light layers to add texture and variety to the foliage (until you can’t tell it’s been cloned). I like desert countries.
• If your coastline still looks too soft to you, alt+select the layer, ctrl+shift+I to invert the selection, and hit delete once or twice. It’ll sharpen up the edge.

Also take lots of breaks. If you find out that this is really fun, suddenly several hours will have gone by and your eyes will hate you.

I’m not much for tutorials, so please leave comments here if you need any help and I’ll happily attempt to clarify.

edit: Here is a quick follow-up providing more detail on how I do coastal effects.

I got carried away.