We are living the era when it's too late to explore the world and to soon to explore outer space. I don't want to discourage your adventorous spirit, so I'm gonna teach you how to create your own ancient looking map, just like the ones wich were used by some of the most famous adventurers from all ages.

But that's not all. You can also use this Instructables in order to create any kind of old looking pice of paper, from pirate maps to misterious magic books. In this Instructables, the photos would show a homemade Westeros map

Supplies

Drawing paper

Drawing supplies

Coffe

Coffe maker

Tray (big enough for the drawing paper)

Lighter

Water

Scissors

Step 1: Desingning Your Map

First of all, we'll take a pice of paper the size we want our final map. Then, we should draw on it with a pencil the desings, countries etc. Try to do it as careful as you can. The rubber marks or other stains that are formed now will appear in the final map, so try to avoid them as much as you can. You shouldn't use anything else a pencil to draw your map. Once we'd treated our paper with coffe in order to give it an ancient look you will have the opportunnity to trace the drawing with ink or a marker. If you do this before, the ink will be removed by the coffe and the map would be ruined.

If you are not very good at drawing, you could use a prnter to print an existing map instead of creating it by yourself. You should pay attention that you're using a simple desing, as the one shown in the images avobe. It can't have any colours or shaded regions. You must print it using the draft option in your printer, in order to print it in a very light tone so it isn't very visible. You will trace it with ink later.

Step 2: "Inking" the Paper With Coffe

Once you have your white paper with the map drawn on it, it's time to age it with coffe. First, you have to turn on your coffe machine, and prepare a big cup of concentrated coffe. As more concentrated the coffe is, the more colour the paper will get. Then you must place the map in the tray, as flat as possible, and cover it slowly with the coffe until all the paper is covered by at least 1-2cm of coffe. Leave the paper in the tray a few hours. Later on, take the map carefully with your hands and place it over a wooden table covered previously by aluminium foil. Put an other table covered with aluminium foil and put some weights over the last table in order to press everything and dry the paper. Let it dry over a hole night and go to the next step.

Step 3: Inking the Map

In this step is where your map will really come to life. You should take some chinese ink, a fine marker or something similar and start inking the drawing you'd previously created in pencil. You could use as many colours as you want, but we recommend you using only dark colours, like black or brown. You can also include letters, coordinates or even a compass, showing where the North is in your map. It could be a good idea to take a look to real ancient maps in order to get ideas for your map. If you want to give color to your map, avoid using permanet markers, or alcohol ones, because they can perfore or even destroy the map, ruining all your hard work.

Step 4: Aging the Map

When you've reached this step, you must have in your hands an ancient looking map, but it would have an "extremelly well conservated" looking. You're gonna solve this problema now. In order to age more your map, there are several techniques:

You could prepare an other cup of concentrated coffe and Paint some parts of your map using a painting brush. The zones you cover now will end with a darker tone of Brown.
You can take a lighter and, with some help of your parents if you're under 16, you can burn some of the edges of the map. This would give it the look of an old document who has survived a dramatic fire hundreads of years ago.
You could cut some holes and break some parts of the map, as if the map hasn't been able to resist the passing of the years.
If you'd folowed the previous technique, you could sew some of the cuts. This could be some restoration made by a monk in a remote abbey.

With all this techniques your map would look more realistic and old. You can combine all of them in order to give your map a deeper background story: maybe is the map of a pirate treasure which was burned by a crazy sailor, or are the plans of a medieval church whose location has been lost hundreads of years ago.

These techniques could be used also to age all type of documents. You could créate an ancient book or, as me, a cursed spell bokk as shown in the last photo.

You only have to use your imagination and be creative. And of course, if you like this tutorial, make sure you follow us in Instructables and in our Instagram @the_nebur_workshop in order to be the first one to read our following tutorials and projects. Thank and good bye, little adventurer.