Icy Crevasse, Adept

Welcome back, Adepts- this is the Icy Crevasse (16x11), my next mini-map! This one features a small cave with a massively dangerous crack down the center, but due to the scale you probably won't have to worry about accidentally slipping in, right? Rather, I expect something will be emerging from the dark depths below in response to your party's presence, so it's not all good news.

Your variant for this one is the Void, a stony recolor with some concerning particle effects. And yes, I have been playing Hollow Knight again this week in preparation for Silksong and this variant is heavily inspired by it. Great game, everyone should play it.

1. A pointy cave with a big crack down the middle. That was the plan, and so I sketched it and that's that. This one is a little more narrow than what it became and has more cracks and fewer bottomless pits, but that's just how I was feeling when I started drawing. This version would have been just as cool, I think, and the concept may well come back sooner or later in a slightly different form.

1. The outlines were a little tricky here because I made a critical error when adjusting the PSD by combining all the outlines into a single layer, then I saved just before I realized my mistake, and finally Photoshop crashed just as I began hitting ctrl+z to correct the problem thus erasing the document's previous states. The result was that I needed to scrap some things, simplify the map somewhat, redraw some stuff, and isolate the individual parts into their pieces again, costing me half a work day. A major bummer. And that's why I'm working on a holiday.

1. A lovely frosty ice map, now that colors are here. I've been trying not to overdo outlines recently, letting the colors and shading carry some of the load. With that in mind, I left much of the terrain without details with the intention of filling in the space with sufficient details in the colors, lighting, and effects such as sparkles, reflections, and mist. Similarly, the snow is just sketched in instead of being fully outlined like in past snowy maps, which is great for keeping the map from getting over-detailed while feeling more organic.

   Ok, positivity over. This was a nightmare, I hate painting in a single color, it becomes a study in values rather than hue and that's really unfun, painting ice is such a massive pain so I eventually gave up and just threw in simple reflections, I drew the snow so many times before I lost my progress in step 2 that I couldn't care any more by this point and just chucked some wherever and called it good enough. Don't expect more ice maps soon :)