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Pro tip: sketching mountains with a coffee stirrer saved my map from looking like a mess of blobs

I spent 3 hours trying to make my mountain ranges look natural with a brush pen, then grabbed a stirrer from my iced latte and dragged it through the ink, and the ridges came out looking like actual peaks from a real topo map, has anyone else found weird objects that work better than fancy tools?
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the_claire
the_claire1mo ago
Oh totally, one time I used the edge of a plastic gift card to scrape away wet ink for tree lines and it looked way better than any eraser I own.
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skyler_white
Right, because why spend $40 on a fancy dip pen when you can just raid your junk drawer like a medieval monk raiding a trash pile. Next time I'll probably try stippling with a toothpick and see if my forests look like they were planted by a tiny drunk lumberjack. I bet the edge of a broken credit card makes for some killer grass textures too, perfect for those fields where you want the ink to look like it had a really bad day. My entire mapmaking kit is basically just office supplies and existential dread at this point.
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