Affinity Designer - stylised maps

[Nelly131]

I'm shortly going to begin a project for a local club which involves drawing stylised maps of parts of rivers (see attached). I'd like to be able to draw them in Designer so that I can put them in PDFs for printing at different resolutions. Is it possible to use a pattern (or something!) to draw the forest / woods on this style of map?

 

Thanks

[v_kyr]

Welcome!

You can reuse some vector forest drawings and the like for filling certain areas here.

Just in order to give you an idea of reusable vector things here, which you can arrange, warp and customize to your individual needs then ...

• forest-trees.afdesign
• forest_silhouette.afdesign

You can also search through the internet for more topographic card vector representations of forests, woods and the like. Just make sure then that those are also available as/in PDF & SVG file format then, as those can be best imported and reused in ADe. - I would go for vectors here (instead of bitmap/pixel images) as those can be best scalled up & down to your personal needs.

See for example:

• freepik trail map forest vector
• freepik trail map wood vector
• ... etc.

[thomaso]

If I understand right you want to create your map in the style of the example, and if I understand right this map uses two designs for trees: a) dark green circular lines in a certain range of sizes b) medium green areas without texture in the shape of the planted area.

For the circles you could use copies of Ellipse objects or create an Image Brush with some random variance in circle size and distance. The flat areas could get drawn with the Pen Tool and an according fill colour. Like so:

[R C-R]

6 minutes ago, thomaso said:

... or create an Image Brush with some random variance in circle size and distance.

Just keep in mind that these will be pixel rather than vector objects so they will need to be crated at sufficiently high resolution that if the PDF exports uses large dimensions they will not look too pixelated.

[firstdefence]

6 hours ago, R C-R said:

Just keep in mind that these will be pixel rather than vector objects so they will need to be crated at sufficiently high resolution that if the PDF exports uses large dimensions they will not look too pixelated.

Or create a set of symbols and or assets to maintain vectors.

[firstdefence]

If you want Map brushes, https://kmalexander.com/free-stuff/fantasy-map-brushes/ K. M. Alexander offers a shed load of brushes for free, they may not be to taste but they are worth downloading and having in your brush collection.

[GarryP]

Most patterns are fairly ‘homogenous’ and, because of that, they probably won’t work well for this sort of thing where the map shows a difference in tree ‘density’ at various places, such as near the river. You could overlay different patterns but that might be a chore.

Also, a pattern would have to normally be clipped inside the ‘shape’ of the woodland but, as can be seen in the map, the trees are sometimes overlapping those shapes. Trickier to do but not impossible.

Assets and/or Symbols, as mentioned by firstdefence above, might be a good choice for this sort of thing if you want the result to be vectors for easy scaling.

Otherwise, brushes, as mentioned by various people above, could be a good way to get it done quickly if you are okay with using bitmaps for the graphics.

I think some good advice would be to try the different methods and see what you like using best and which gives you the result you need.

[Nelly131]

Thanks for all the replies so far. Much food for thought. It’ll be a couple of weeks before I start the project proper, I’ll report back!
any more tips are more than welcome