How to make a better world map in Inkarnate

Inkarnate is the tool I use for every commission, and it's the one most authors try first when they decide to make their own map. Getting something on the screen is easy. Getting a map that looks like a real place takes a few habits.

This is the workflow I use for world maps. Most of the difference comes down to three things:

• Work at world scale. A map of a whole planet doesn't need every village.
• Leave plenty of ocean.
• Think about how the land got that way: where the mountains came from, where the weather comes from, and where the water runs.

1. Start with the right canvas

Use the World Map preset and work in 4K. You can export larger later, but 4K keeps the detail sharp while you work.

A 4:3 canvas is a reliable shape for a world. 16:9 works too.

Before you draw any land, block out your layout with a placeholder stamp or a blueprint so you know roughly where everything goes. Keep extra room at the edges for ocean. A continent that touches the frame looks cropped.

2. Shape landmasses that look real

Sketch your coastlines with a circle brush at size 2, then bucket-fill once the outline is closed. Drawing the outline first gives you a coast with real wiggle in it.

Avoid rectangles, shapes that hug the border, and coasts that run parallel to each other for long stretches. Real coastlines don't do any of that.

Leave more water than land. Earth is about 70 percent ocean, and a world with too little sea feels cramped.

If you have several continents, think about how they might once have fit together. Coasts that roughly mirror each other across an ocean make a planet feel like it has a history.

3. Place mountains first

Mountains decide almost everything else: where rivers run, where it rains, and where people end up living. So they go down before anything else.

Zoom in and plan your major ranges. Build them as C and S shaped chains instead of straight lines. Pick one range to be the biggest and use it as the scale for all the others. Then fade the mountains down into hills and valleys, so they don't sit on flat ground like stickers.

Once the ranges are in, look at the valleys between them. That's where your water wants to go.

4. Use climate and rain shadows

Decide where your weather comes from. Wind picks up moisture over the ocean and drops it as rain when it hits mountains. The side facing the sea ends up wet and green, and the far side ends up dry. That dry side is the rain shadow, and it's where your deserts belong.

Keep the changes between biomes gradual. The polar, temperate and tropical bands make a good rough guide: cold near the poles, hot near the equator, with local exceptions wherever mountains and coasts get in the way.

5. Draw rivers that make sense

Rivers flow downhill toward a lake or the sea. Along the way, small streams join into bigger rivers. A river almost never splits in two, except where it fans out into a delta at the coast.

Start lots of small rivers high on the wet side of your mountains and guide them down through the valleys. On a world map, use a very thin line. A river drawn as thick as a road looks wrong at that scale.

If you only remember one rule from this guide, make it this one: rivers merge as they go downhill. They don't branch.

6. Build biomes with layers

Instead of one flat fill for a forest or a desert, layer textures at low opacity. Mix grass, bare ground, rock, snow and sand, so the land has the kind of variation your eye notices without being able to name it.

Scale regional textures down for a world map. Forests read best over darker ground. And keep your trees small next to the mountains, or the whole map loses its sense of size.

7. Add depth with brush layers

Make an overlay layer on top at about 50 percent opacity. Pick one direction for your light, usually the top left, and stick to it everywhere. Paint dark shadows and soft highlights on the mountains to match.

A multiply layer works well for snowy terrain. Subtle washes of color over whole regions help them stand apart without drawing a border.

8. Finish the world

Layer your ocean textures for depth and surf: darker water for the deep sea, brighter water along the coasts and shallows.

Then add the people. Settlements go near fresh water. Farmland spreads out around the big cities. Roads and sea routes should connect places that would actually trade with each other, by the easiest path instead of a straight line.

Mistakes to avoid

• Too much land and not enough ocean.
• Continents shaped like rectangles.
• Coastlines that run perfectly parallel.
• Rivers that run uphill, split apart, or end in the middle of nowhere.
• Biomes that change all at once, like a desert right next to a rainforest with no mountain in between.
• Trees and mountains at the wrong scale for the map.

When to hand it off

If you enjoy this, make it yourself. Plenty of published books carry maps their authors drew, and readers love them.

If you'd rather spend those hours writing, that's the job I do. A map of one or two continents is $400 and a whole world starts at $600, delivered in a week, and the map is yours to use however you like. Here's what's included. If you've got a rough sketch from following this guide, send it to me. That's exactly where I like to start.