Tired of my "Cartoony" looking maps. HELP!

[foremost]

If you'd like to make your work appear a little more gritty, I might consider changing the way you draw the forests, in particular. That seems to be an obvious source of the "bubbles" mentioned by another poster above. Some jagged, scary-looking trees might be hard to draw, but would look really good. Just experiment with different forest designs, I suppose.

I would also have drawn the bridges in the Itania map using only one line (some appear to be done this way, but others are drawn with two lines, making them look really big). I think proportions are quite important to a gritty look, simply because having things be too big or too small evokes the same feeling a cartoon would. Humor. A lack of realism (think of the political cartoons that portray politicians with big ears or noses).

Beyond that, you might try experimenting with your hand-writing. That might be difficult if you naturally write that way, but maybe some sharp edges and fewer gradual curves might make it look less cartoony. Just don't bubble your letters

So those are, potentially, some ways to reduce the cartoonish appearance without changing your medium.

[Diamond]

What's wrong with sunshine and rainbows? I'm doing it wrong.

But seriously, it could be something as simple as just adding some color to your map. Check this out:

[J.Edward]

What's wrong with sunshine and rainbows? I'm doing it wrong.

But seriously, it could be something as simple as just adding some color to your map. Check this out:

That's a potent demonstration.

[Midgardsormr]

This is a fascinating question because, to me, it gets into the relationship between the psychology of the viewer and line quality. Can you get "gritty" using technical pens? I think the answer is yes, but it might not be so easy to figure out how.

The Itania map is a good place to start. When you digitized it, I think you thresholded it too harshly. It appears to be a 1-bit image, with only pure black or pure white, which has unfortunately destroyed any subtlety in the lines that might have been there. In addition, it's made it as contrasty as it can possibly be. A dark and moody feeling will be better evoked with lower contrast. But that's not always ideal if you have a map intended to print, since you're stuck with the white of the paper.

The perfectly round hills are very friendly and cartoony-looking. Real hills don't have that shape to them, and they flow in ridges just like mountains do. Take a look at the shape of the hills in a Pete Fenlon map, like this one:


Another area to work on is your settlement icons. Instead of little pictures of towns, try simplifying the markers to a circle or dot. I'd say also leave off the tilled field icons. Most viewers will assume that much of the land surrounding a settlement is farmland, so the symbols aren't adding information. For a whimsical style, that's perfect, but for a more serious and grim look, I think they're out of place.

Let's consider the Solton map. I am asking myself what a gritty, dark map would look like, and how does this one not align? It feels a little too precise. Disquiet comes in part from a lack of knowledge. The bold, regimented lines here, and the perfectly-spaced sand texture, give me a feeling that this community is orderly and safe. I feel like I know exactly where every bush is. Even if the rendering is not accurate, it gives the impression that here is a town where everything is known. Perhaps if some of the lines were only suggestions rather than being so explicitly defined. For instance, what if the outer lines of the roads and fields didn't exist? There would be an ambiguity about where the path actually was and where the field left off. We would still infer the existence of paths simply because they exist where the structures don't. And instead of having a clearly marked road that leads "to Faalwood," maybe it would just be an arrow next to the name Faalwood. Maybe there's a road, maybe there's not.

I'm sure there are lots of other ways you could slightly modify your style to get closer to the feeling you want. I hope to see more of your work and find out whether you can get closer to what you want, particularly if you can do it without changing your medium, which you obviously have considerable skill in.

[Durakken]

An exorcise suggestion occured to me...

Take the Itania map to PS or GIMP and remove all hills, the lines in the forests, the lines around the coast and text, all the settlement icons, and the compass.
Leave everything else.
Print several copies... now redo all of those things you just removed, but in different styles, keeping all the copies and making sure to not copy what you've done in the last one.

The text itself is contributes to a cartoony feel, but text is not a huge thing to overcome and removing it could cause more problems than we want so leave it.
The reason you'd want to do this is because this makes you explicitly change what you are doing to create a different effect with all the essentials that largely won't effect the end product already there.

If you do this it'd be great to see the result of it ^.^ so please if you do, post em up

[J.Edward]

Durakken's idea there is a pretty good one for working on trying other styles and ways to do things.
It's tougher for you, as you're working traditionally, to try out variations with the same piece but his suggestion is a really good way to do it.

What Midgard said got me thinking... do you have some examples of 'gritty' maps that you like?
That might help to point you in the right direction, based on what you 'see' as dark and gritty.

As an example, both Diamond and Max can do a dark gritty map, but they do it in very different ways.
Diamond's is definitely darker and often has sharper edges/lines.
Max often uses smoother and at times even rounded linework but can still make it dark and gritty.
A lot of that has to do with the color stage.

[Caenwyr]

What's wrong with sunshine and rainbows? I'm doing it wrong.

But seriously, it could be something as simple as just adding some color to your map. Check this out:

This is awesome. Because it's a mix of styles! The map is still kinda... naively pretty, if you want, but the blood drops turn that cute little map into a sort of horror story. I immediately think of an optimistic explorer equipped with this map walking into some serious kind of trouble... Great start for a gritty story if you ask me

[Redleg]

After reading through all of the advice, I decided to take about 5 minutes today during my lunchbreak and work out what I think I want as far as a gritty/darker style map. Here's what I've come up with.



I still like my cartoony maps, as they are relaxing for me to draw. However, I want to be able to switch it up from map to map, not simply making a new map in the same style every time. My hand writing needs plenty of work still, but even this little bit made me quite happy. Bubbly forests and uniform hills are gone, and I went with what I call (because I have literally no artistic education or training) a shakier style when defining coastlines and areas in general. My uniform lines made everything seem too perfectly laid out. As always, I really appreciate all the feedback given and am extremely happy that so many long time members and well established ones at that took a few moments to help me out! Great community!

[Chick]

That's a much more natural looking coastline. Now you have large points and small points on it ... next try to make some medium sized points as well. Keep the same general shape to all of them, just add more of varying sizes.

[Redleg]

Thank you so much for whipping that up. It makes it look 10,000 times better.