Josh works with the toolset I most enjoy - the iPad, Apple Pencil, and the app Procreate. Josh Stolarz in particular nails the style I like good-old fashioned fantasy line art but with just enough texture and shading to make the map pop right off the page (or screen). The style is reminiscent of field maps drawn by 19th and early 20th century explorers, cartographers and archaeologists, and became a staple of fantasy thanks to the enormously influential Middle Earth maps created by J.R.R. While I like these apps and respect what they do, I have a particular style or aesthetic I prefer in the form of hand-drawn (digital) maps created by talented individuals as Jonathan Roberts, and Josh Stolarz. In fact, there’s a healthy industry catering to this need with apps such as Wonderdraft, Dungeondraft and Inkarnate, along with a slew of random map generators, some of which I’ve reviewed in the past. Authors and dungeon masters alike need maps - maps for preparation, and maps for presentation.

I’m not alone in this need to create maps, nor in my constraints in time, skill and money. Neither option appeals to me, for reasons I don’t need to discuss here. Faced with such limitations, I can either spend months (or years) improving my drawing skills, or spend hundreds (or thousands) to commission professional artists to draw them for me.

Review: Josh Stolarz’s Map Maker for Procreate and PhotoshopĪs much as I enjoy drawing maps for my fantasy setting, I admit that I’m short on artistic talent.

Wacom intuos affinity photo