Finally figured out how to make my coastlines look less like a potato

I was struggling for weeks to draw natural looking bays and inlets on my main continent, and then I tried using a piece of torn cardboard to stamp random ink shapes as a guide. It gave me a perfect, jagged outline to trace over in Procreate! What's your favorite weird trick for getting past a creative block on a map?

3 comments

3 Comments

jade322mo ago

Yeah the dry rice scanner trick is genius lol. I've used coffee grounds for rocky textures and even a crumpled up paper bag for cave walls.

james6612mo ago

That's such a smart idea, using a real world texture like that. I've done something similar by dropping a handful of dry rice on a scanner and using the scan as a landmass template. It gives you those crazy random shapes you'd never think to draw yourself. Makes you wonder what other junk around the house could become a mountain range or a forest.

taylor.mary24d ago

The rice trick is wild, how much did you have to mess with the contrast and levels to get it to read right as landmasses? I’ve tried similar stuff with salt grains and they just came out looking like noise instead of continents.