STEP 1:
DRAWING A ROUGH SKETCH

Hello and welcome to our little How-to-make-a-nice-little-map-thingy tutorial. Our plan is to deliver a typical Santharian grayscale map in the style you can view it in the Santharian map section. In this very case I've taken the drawing of the R'unorian Isles to use it for this tutorial.

So what ingredients do we need? First of all some imagination. Then a good graphic program, Adobe Photoshop (Version 5.5 or higher) prefered - at least this tutorial refers to all functions which are provided with Photoshop. Yup. And finally some time. Or lots of. Depending on how detailed the map should look like.

Okeydokey. Time for a start:

• Change the resolution of your screen to 1024x768 (or higher).
  

• Open your Adobe Photoshop.
  

• Assure yourself that all important palettes/windows are visible. The main TOOLBAR on the left, and four small windows on the right: the BRUSHES, the LAYERS, the HISTORY and finally the OPTIONS window (they are all shown by default). If any of these is missing make it visible by clicking on the appropriate menu entry at the WINDOW menu.
  
  You can also click on FILE --> PREFERENCES --> GENERAL and then click on RESET PALETTE LOCATIONS TO DEFAULT in order to receive the same effect.
  

• Select FILE --> NEW in the menu.
   

• Give the picture a name and an appropriate size, e.g. 700 pixels width and 600 pixels height. (Pictures shown here accompanying this tutorial are only reduced in size, but initially have much larger proportions.)
  

• Select GREYSCALE as the mode and click on the WHITE option button in the contents frame. Confirm this with OK.
  

• Grab a simple PAINTBRUSH TOOL (or press "B") with a small brush size to draw a very rough sketch of how the isles should look like. No need to do hundreds of details now. We will come to this later on. This should result in something like this:

• In this case Xenos, part of the Santharian team, delivered this sketch (well, I actually moved some isles a bit around in order to prepare it for the drawing), so this step was a bit easier for me:)
  

• Before proceeding to the next stage: Time to save the whole mess! Important: Ensure yourself that you save the file with a PSD extension!

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