From a sketch to an editable atlas

Most writers who need a map already have one. It is in a notebook, on the back of a printout, or in a drawing app as a flat image that no longer matches the book. What it lacks is knowledge: which shape is Varnhold land, who holds it, which characters are standing in Duskhollow tonight.

This guide is about how to digitize a hand-drawn map so it becomes that kind of map. You import the scan, review what Lokee proposes, then fix the shapes with the drawing tools and link them to your story bible. Everything on the map side of Lokee is free on every plan, including the free desktop app. Only the AI reading of an image costs anything, and there is a free route even for that.

The running example is the demo world of The Ashen Circle: a walled capital, Duskhollow, on the River Tarn, with the Varnhold estate outside the walls. Imagine the sketch of it you drew on the back of chapter one.

Why rebuild a map you already have?

A flat image cannot change, and a story world does. Borders move after wars, a city gains a wall, a character crosses a mountain range in chapter nine. In Lokee every shape can be linked to an entity in your story bible, and that link is what makes the map useful while you write:

• people with a Place field appear on the map automatically, at whatever moment you are viewing (Following characters across the map);
• territories can change holder from a given moment on (Mapping a world that changes);
• the entity card shows every map the entity appears on.

None of that works on a picture. So the first job is to turn the picture into shapes. If you are still deciding how much world to build before drawing anything, how to start worldbuilding argues for one map, not an atlas, and this guide is how that one map gets made.

Three ways to start a map

On the Maps page you have three ways in.

+ New map opens New map, where Start from offers presets: World (continents, seas, mountains and rivers), Political (regions, territories, cities and names), Region (a country or province down to villages and roads), City (districts, streets, walls and buildings), Building (rooms and walls of one place), Star empire (stars, planets, nebulae and hyperlanes) and Blank. The preset decides which kinds of shapes the palette offers first. You can still put a photo underneath later as a Base image in the map inspector (PNG, JPEG, WebP or SVG, up to 25 MB) and trace by hand.

Add example maps adds three finished, linked maps to study: a star chart, a world on one of its planets, and a city in that world. Give them five minutes before you start; they show what layers, labels and child maps look like when done.

From an image… is the route this guide takes.

Digitize a hand-drawn map: Detail, areas and what to read

From an image… opens New map from an image. Choose the photo or scan, name the map, pick what it should Start from (for the Duskhollow sketch, Region), and decide Who runs the AI (next section). Then Next.

Lokee first outlines the areas it can find in the picture, on your own device, before any AI is involved. This step decides most of the quality, and it costs nothing:

• Detail moves between Fewer areas and More areas. The aim, as the dialog says, is that each coast, lake and forest gets its own outline. The AI names the numbered areas afterwards; it does not draw them. If two regions fuse into one outline here, no amount of AI will split them later.
• Number of areas sets how many of the found areas to keep, out of the total, with Back to the suggested count if you overshoot.
• What to read from the map chooses between Areas (land, water, terrain), Settlements and places and Names. If your sketch has no writing on it, untick Names and save the cost.
• Look closer at parts of the map reads the map again in overlapping pieces. It is worth it for a large or busy map, and the dialog shows what it adds before you commit.

Then Read the map. Progress lines tell you what is happening: "Naming the areas…", "Checking the result against the photo…".

Who runs the AI, and what it costs

The Who runs the AI choice depends on where your vault lives:

• Lokee credits run the reading on Lokee's side. This needs a paid plan (see /pricing). The dialog shows the most it can cost before you start; you are charged what the map really costs, usually much less, and the rest comes back when the run ends.
• Outlines only (no AI) is free on every plan. Lokee keeps the outlines it found, turns water-looking areas into sea or lakes and the rest into land, and leaves groups of symbols for you to name. For a clean sketch with few labels, this is often all you need.
• My Anthropic key, My OpenAI key and Local model (Ollama) appear only in a local vault in the desktop app. Keys are the ones saved in the vault's AI settings and go from your computer straight to the provider. An Ollama model must be a vision model; the built-in local model cannot read images.

A cloud vault reads maps with Lokee credits or with no AI at all; the dialog says so. Own keys and local models are a local-vault feature by design, so a shared cloud vault never depends on one person's key.

Review what was found before it touches your vault

Nothing reaches your vault until you review it and choose Create map. The review shows the proposals over your image, grouped as Sea, Land, Lakes and marshes, Terrain, Settlements, Names and Unknown. Each area carries a number that matches the badge on the image, so you can see exactly which outline a row means.

For each row you can Accept or Reject, change its Kind, and correct its Name. Accept all undecided finishes the easy ones in one go once you have dealt with the doubtful rows. Rows the AI could not classify stay out unless you choose a kind for them.

Two review tools matter more than they look:

• Merge selected. Tick two or more area rows and merge them into one. Use it when the outlining split a kingdom along a river you drew too boldly.
• Unmerge undoes a merge you regret.

Press Create map with rows still undecided and Lokee asks whether to Accept all and create, Reject all and create, or go Back to the review. Go back. Every row you accept carelessly becomes a shape you delete by hand later.

The new map opens with a banner: Imported with AI — it can make mistakes. Compare with the photo (Layers → Photo) and reshape or redraw anything that's off. Take that literally. The photo stays underneath at half strength; in Layers, the Photo row shows, hides and fades it with Photo opacity.

The Duskhollow sketch, end to end

Here is how the example runs, so you can see where the time goes.

The sketch is a page of a notebook, photographed flat by a window: the River Tarn running top to bottom, the walled city on its east bank, the Varnhold estate to the north, a forest to the west, a marsh where the river widens in the south, and six names in pencil.

Reading. From an image…, name it "Duskhollow and the Tarn", Start from: Region, Outlines only (no AI) for the first pass. At the default Detail the outliner finds nine areas: the river is one long ribbon, the marsh and the river have fused, the forest is in two pieces because a pencil crease runs through it, and the city wall made a clean loop. Nudge Detail toward More areas until the marsh separates from the river, then stop; pushing further starts splitting the forest into shading. Nine becomes eleven. Read the map.

Review. Water-looking areas came in as Sea and Lakes and marshes, the rest as Land. The river was read as sea because it is blue; change its Kind. The two forest halves: tick both, Merge selected, set the kind to terrain. The city loop is land; keep it, you will redraw the wall as a line in a minute. Reject a smudge near the margin that came in as an area. Names were not read (no AI), so the rows have No name; type Duskhollow, Tarnside, Varnhold and the rest now, while the photo is in front of you. Create map.

Fixing. With the photo at half strength underneath, turn on Snap to borders and draw the wall as a line around the city loop so it meets itself. Draw the river as a line down the middle of the ribbon, then delete the ribbon area. Paint bucket inside the marsh outline to fill it as marsh. Stick together across the hairline between the forest and the Varnhold land. Ten minutes, most of it the river.

Linking. Select the city loop: Link to an entity…, Duskhollow. The forest, the estate, the marsh: link each to its place entity, creating the entity first where none exists. Select the city again and Create child map here; that child is where the Gilded Lantern, the Watch House and the Undercroft will be drawn, as districts and buildings on a City preset.

Now open the character Rowan Ashe. On maps shows the city child map with "is here", because his Location is The Gilded Lantern, inside Tarnside, inside Duskhollow. You did not draw him; the chain did it. That is the moment the picture became an atlas.

Fix, layer and style the imported map

The tools that matter after an import

An imported map is a draft. These are the tools I reach for, roughly in order.

• Snap to borders (in the toolbar). Areas and walls you draw follow nearby borders exactly, until you move away. Turn it on before redrawing a coastline next to an existing region and the two meet without slivers.
• Paint bucket. Click inside a closed outline, or between outlines, to fill it with the chosen kind. The fastest way to turn an empty island into forest.
• Terrain eraser. Drag across filled terrain to cut it away; each area stays one feature. It only cuts terrain drawn as a filled area.
• Stick together. Brush over a gap between two borders to close it; the brush width is the largest gap it closes. Who moves chooses Onto neighbour or Meet in the middle. This is the fix for hairline gaps an import leaves between neighbouring regions.
• Split. Draw a line all the way across an area to cut it in two; the larger piece keeps the name and links.
• Shape tools: Freehand, Rectangle, Ellipse, Polygon and Lasso ("Drag around the area. The lasso always closes."). To edit an outline, drag the small handle on an edge to add a point, and Alt-click a point to remove it. Smooth and Roughen in the inspector change an outline's character in one click.

Undo and redo are always there (Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+Shift+Z).

Layers and stamps

Layers can be added, renamed (double-click), reordered, hidden and locked. A layer with features cannot be deleted until you move or delete them, so nothing vanishes by accident. A practical split for an imported world: the photo, a terrain layer, a political layer for territories, and a labels layer you lock while working on the shapes underneath.

Built-in terrain draws mountains, hills, forests and so on as symbols. If your world has its own look (black pines, salt flats, coral), make it a stamp set. Under My stamps in the palette, + Add your own or Manage… opens the Stamp library. A New stamp set takes a Set name, a kind it Behaves as, and 1 to 8 images (PNG, WebP, JPEG or SVG; transparent backgrounds look best; each is shrunk to 256 px and must fit in 150 KB). Every map in the vault can then use the set. A stamp brush draws in two ways, chosen under How the brush draws: Fill area (drag around an area to fill it) or Along line (a line of symbols, like a ridge), with Density and Scatter to taste.

Labels, fonts and style

Select a feature to give it a Label, a Label placement (Free, Inside the area, Along the line or Hidden) and a Label size. Rivers labelled along the line read like a real atlas.

With nothing selected, the inspector shows the map itself. Label font sets the map default (Classic, IM Fell English, Cinzel, Almendra, Uncial Antiqua or Exo 2), and any single label can use another Font. Style switches between Flat and Inked: Inked draws terrain as pen-and-ink symbols with hatching, like a hand-drawn map. Paper texture finishes the look. A sketch redrawn in Inked often looks closer to the original than the original did.

Link shapes to the story bible, then grow child maps

Linking is the step that makes the map part of the book. Select a shape and, under Linked entity, choose Link to an entity…. Link every region, city and building that matters to its place entity; create the entity first if it does not exist. Setting up a story bible that scales explains how to type places so the chain of Location fields works.

Once linked, clicking the shape while viewing offers Open followed by the entity's name; the card's On maps section shows a cropped preview of every map it appears on; characters whose location is that place appear as tokens; and regions can be held by a faction or ruler and change hands over time.

One map cannot show a continent and the inside of a tavern. Select the city on your world map and use Create child map here. Lokee creates a new map anchored to that shape; on the parent, a small mark shows the city opens a child map, and clicking it offers Open map: followed by the city's name. On the child, ↑ Back to returns you up a level, and the breadcrumbs show the whole path. Child maps also make people roll up correctly: a character in a building drawn only on the city map appears at the city's anchor on the world map.

Export the atlas, or carry it with the vault

Export offers PNG image, SVG image and Map file (JSON). Exports show what you see at the current Viewing position, so you can export the map as it was at any moment in your world.

What differs by vault and plan:

• In a local vault in the desktop app, every export is clean and SVG is always available.
• In a cloud vault on the free plan, PNG exports carry a small "Made with Lokee" mark and SVG is not offered. Paid plans export clean PNG and SVG; see /pricing.
• JSON map files are never marked. Import map (JSON) on the Maps page brings one back as a new map, in the same vault or another.

Maps also travel with the vault itself: zip exports, restore points and sync all carry them and their images.

Common mistakes, and what Lokee doesn't do here

Common mistakes

Reading the image at the default Detail. The outliner is where the map is decided, and the default suits an average scan, not yours. Spend a minute on the slider before paying for anything.

Paying for AI on a sketch with no labels. If there is nothing written on the page, Outlines only (no AI) gives you the same areas for free; the names were always going to be typed by you.

Accepting all undecided rows to get it over with. Every accepted smudge is a shape with a kind and possibly a name. Reject noise in the review; deleting it on the map later is slower.

Styling before linking. A beautiful map you cannot put characters on is a cover illustration. Link first, so the map starts paying back while you write, then make it pretty.

One huge map for everything. Buildings drawn on a world map are unreadable and slow to edit. Draw the city as a child map and let the roll-up carry its people up to the world view.

Forgetting the photo is still there. It is fine to keep, but a half-strength scan under a finished map confuses exports. Hide the Photo layer once you no longer trace.

What Lokee doesn't do here

It does not redraw your map in your own hand: the import gives you shapes and kinds, and the Inked style is Lokee's pen, not yours. It does not read rivers, roads or walls as lines; you draw those. It does not know scale or distance, so a map imported from a sketch has no kilometres on it. And it does not turn a photo of a map into a photo-quality map; if the sketch is the art you want to publish, keep the original and use Lokee's version for the knowledge.

In five minutes

1. Scan or photograph the sketch flat, in even light.
2. From an image…, with Outlines only (no AI) first if unsure; you can always import again with AI.
3. Adjust Detail and Number of areas before reading.
4. Review every row; merge what was split, reject what is noise.
5. Fix borders with Snap to borders and Stick together, fill with the Paint bucket.
6. Link every shape the story uses to its entity.
7. Add child maps for the cities where scenes happen.
8. Only then style it: stamps, fonts, Inked.

To see a finished, linked atlas without importing anything, the demo includes the city of Duskhollow. The fantasy map maker overview and the maps section of the help give the feature list. When your atlas is ready, continue with Following characters across the map.