How To Create a Fictional Map for Fantasy or Sci-Fi Novels
Dewi Hargreaves
Writing stories and drawing maps of places that don't exist.
When you open a fantasy book, you usually can’t flick through more than a few pages before you bump into a map. They’re a luxury readers have enjoyed at least since the first editions of The Lord of the Rings. There’s a simple joy in seeing the world within the pages all laid out before you—in being able to trace the journeys of the characters within as they make their way, chapter by chapter, from one end of the world to the other.
But how are these maps made?
There are illustrators who specialise in the production of maps—like myself. It seems extremely niche, but when you think about it, there are maps all around us in our modern world. Video games are full of them, as are the hundreds of fantasy, sci-fi, and historical fiction books that are published every year. Schools and university campuses distribute them to new students, and game masters may commission them for their sprawling Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. There is plenty of work to keep us busy.
I’m going to take you through the production of a map, from start to finish.
Step one: Sketching a fantasy map
If a client has absolutely no way of getting a sketch to me, I’m happy to take written directions—but sending a sketch to a map illustrator makes it much more likely that the final piece will resemble your world most accurately. When I’m beginning work on a commission, I often ask questions about the world—the sizes of cities, the biomes, and whether the client has any other maps in mind whose style they like. I create my own sketch based off whatever information I’ve been given, then send it back, asking for edits—if a city isn’t quite in the right place, a mountain range looks weird, or a peninsula needs to be cut, it’s much easier to do it now, after a very quick sketch, than after the inking process when much more time has gone into the map.
After a couple of sketches have been sent back and forth, the inking begins!
Step two: Fantasy map specifications
When creating maps, especially ones for print—those to go in books, for example—there are some key things that need to be accounted for: the bleed, the gutter, and the size.
Books come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, depending on which country they’re published in and what genre they are. Hardcovers are different sizes to paperbacks, UK books are different sizes to US books, and nonfiction books are often, but not always, different sizes to fiction. Your illustrator will need to know the exact size (this is called the ‘trim size’) before they start work, if you want your map to fit your page perfectly. If a client doesn’t have a set trim size, I work in either 6" by 9" or 12" by 9", depending on whether it’s a single page or double page map, since this size looks fine in most books.
The bleed is the area around the edge of the page which can be cut away during printing! Printing books isn’t an exact science, especially if you’re producing print-on-demand books. Most printing companies require there to be no important information within a set distance of the edge of the page, in case something really important, like part of the text, is cut off during printing.
The gutter is the space down the centre of the book, between two pages. If you ask your illustrator for a double-page map, they may shunt important features away from the centre of the image - you don’t want to get to the printing stage and find that the glorious Imperial Metropolis, the capital of your world’s empire, has disappeared down the gutter and can’t be seen.
Step three: The fantasy map design
I’m sometimes commissioned to design maps in colour, but the vast majority of my work is in black and white. Printing in black and white is much cheaper, and you could argue that readers expect their book-maps to be black and white. Colour images translated to greyscale often lose some of their detail, as various shades of grey blend into each other.
The key to designing a visually appealing black and white map is in the composition: the balance of empty space to busy space, and the use of texture and line thickness to draw the eye to important elements.
As an example: this is the map I recently designed to go in the front matter of the book I co-wrote, Tales of Somewhere Else (I’m using one of my own pieces rather than a client’s because it’s much simpler for copyright).
I designed this map to be somewhat minimalist—you’ll notice it has no border; I liked the idea of it sort of bleeding off into the rest of the white space surrounding it on the page. The coast is a thicker line than the rest, and has a thinner outline where the water is—the pairing of lines makes it easier to see at a glance where the coast is, and to differentiate it from the rivers and mountains, which are formed by singular lines. The High Kingdom Without Name is also drawn in thicker lines, because these are floating islands above the ground—I wanted to give the impression that they were on a different plane to the rest of the terrain. The ocean, meanwhile, is taken up with guide lines that shoot out from the sun icon in the corner, but disappear where they touch the land. This both shows the viewer where the sea is by giving it a different texture to the land, and gives the land a sense that it is lying above the water, almost popping out from the page.
Finally, of course, don’t forget that text can be used to visual and narrative effect, too—it can fill space that looks empty without it, and it can tell a story, as it does here. For instance, Deonada appears twice, each time with a question mark. And why should the reader stay away from The Old Fen? I’ve had people commission maps with names crossed out, or characters’ names scribbled on them as though they themselves drew it. Your map is a part of the book and can be part of the story, if you want it to be.
Another thing on text: Remember you can adjust the spacing between the letters. This is important if you need a text label to cover a wide area, but don’t want it to end up thick and chunky, with lines much thicker than the rest of the image—which can ruin the look or make the text overly visible.
In general, the eye is drawn to sharp, black areas of colour first, then areas of intricacy. In the map above, the title at the bottom will likely be the first thing a viewer’s eye rests on as the thickest and darkest lines in the image, then the title of ‘Near Cuthun’, and the other details after that.
Step four: Time and patience
Every map takes a fair amount of work; mine take, on average, between 9,000 and 18,000 individual brushstrokes, and the work is anywhere from 6 to 10 hours. But the result is, I hope, an intricate piece of art that elegantly represents the world you’ve invented and brings it to life in the imagination of the viewer. If I’m achieving that, then I’ve done my job. It is a uniquely fulfilling and heartwarming career, especially when you get to see first-hand the reaction of a client to a map they love.
If you’re interested in seeing a wider showcase of my work, you can find that $ here$ , and if you want to get a map for yourself, you can find my commissions page $ here$ . I’m also an author, and you can buy my books,The Shield Road, Eyes on the Blue Star, and Tales of Somewhere Else on $ Amazon$ !
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