“I want to see mountains again, Gandalf, mountains. And then find somewhere where I can rest.”
In this 4-part series we’ll walk through the reckoning of a Lord of the Rings style fantasy map, right in ArcGIS Pro. We map-makers get to breathe honest to goodness geographic life into the seminal aesthetic found in the LOTR cartography, and I think that’s a bit of magic just waiting around for us to wield.
The mountains of Christopher Tolkien are distinct things, more like fences and boundaries than a geological surface. In this how-to we will walk through creating a repeating mountain graphic and rolling the placement dice in our GIS, so that the misty mountains are fantastical representations of real honest to goodness places.
0:00 Eye-wateringly dramatic intro
0:14 Examining mountains in Tolkien’s map
0:45 Photoshopping a mountain image asset
1:12 Wes Jones’ fantasy mapping channel
1:30 Add a mountain marker layer
2:36 Highlights
3:08 Add a foothill marker layer
4:28 Saving mountain symbol to a style
Fantasy mapping for fun? Making custom D&D maps with read data? Mapping your municipality in an eye-catching and exciting way? Give it a go! Here are the graphical assets I made in this video if you’d prefer to use mine. If you just can’t get enough fantasy mapping, check out Wes Jones’ channel, where he teaches you how to draw them from scratch.
Adventures In Mapping 