Vintage Treasure Map Craft Tutorial (X Marks the Spot!)

Hi there! I’m so excited to share this Vintage Treasure Map Craft Tutorial (X Marks the Spot!) with you. This is great for a kids who loves pirates, or an X letter theme! I show you how to make it look like a worn, vintage map, but you can design it any way you like! Let’s get started.

Be sure to check out our secret compartment book tutorial – a perfect craft to accompany your treasure findings!

Vintage Treasure Map Craft Tutorial (X Marks the Spot!)

Supplies:

• White construction paper
• Brown, light tan, light blue, red, and olive green markers
• Black pen

Start by gently tearing off the edges of your construction paper, all the way around. This gives the paper a natural, worn edge like it’s very old. Then, take your brown marker and go around all the rough edges. This mimics the type of paper distressing that is often done by burning the edges of paper with a lighter, but is much safer!

Now take your light tan marker and color inside of the brown line, making a border that’s about half an inch wide. See how cool this makes the edges of the paper look? The wet marker causes them to bend and warp, and it really starts looking like aged paper. Now take your pen and freehand draw an island in the middle of your paper.

In one corner, draw a compass rose. You can make it as fancy or plain as you would like! Now we need to add some landscape to our island. I drew a river and a couple mountains. Take your blue pen and draw squiggles in the ocean around the island to represent water, and color in the river. You can also go over the mountain symbols with your green marker.

I also outlined the island with green marker, as it’s a very tropical island and the green represents grass! You can add in more bits of landscape as you go, like the extra mountains I added. Now take your red marker and draw a dashed line as a path to the treasure, and mark the spot where the treasure is with a big red X!

Now if you’d like you can go back in and add some more obstacles to make the treasure hunt path make more sense. I added in a big cave and some quicksand! When your marker is all dry, go ahead and roll up your map.

And squish it a little! Yep, no paper lasts a couple hundred years without some wear to it! You can also bend the edges up and down, or even crumple up the map entirely! The great thing about construction paper is that it’s made of very soft fibers, so it’s great for distressing and won’t rip like heavier papers. Now smooth out your map.

And you’re all done! I hope you found this Vintage Treasure Map Tutorial helpful and have fun making a treasure map of your own!!

You might also like our pirate activity pages!