Snowy Ruins, Adept

Hello again, Adepts- this is the Snowy Ruins (16x11), or maybe the Desert Ruins if that's more your speed. I wanted to give painting snow drifts another try since I've been toying around with drawing with fewer outlines recently, and so a map like this felt like the perfect way to practice.

1. I made a few small changes after this initial sketch, for the sake of the flow of the map. Primarily I mirrored the ruin on the bottom and slid the well over a little with the intention of framing the center of the map a little better. Not a huge change, but I'll stand by the decision as I believe it makes the map feel much better.

   I also added a few trees and rocks, but those are mostly for show so they're probably not worth discussing.

   

   1. As for the outlines, I did end up drawing just about everything from scratch this time. Wait, I think the rocks are reused, and 2 of the trees, that's right. I suppose the ruins didn't particularly need to be drawn fresh but I never like the look of my old brick walls so I tend to try again when I get the chance. This time I think I wanted the walls to be a little simper and less detailed, maybe giving the impression of being powdered with snow without having to actually draw snow on top. I'd wager that I won't be reusing these either.

      The trees began life as my typical pre-drawn trees but I wanted to try making them look more like pines so I erased just about everything other than their outermost lines and redrew the insides to be more uniform and ring-shaped. Not sure it was worth the effort but I had to try it out and see.

      Lastly, I wanted to try just painting the snow drifts in instead of outlining them as I used to do. I never liked the look of the outlined snow as I felt it added detail to something that didn't need it. I don't know why I never tried painting them until now, I guess I just wasn't thinking straight or never actually thought of it. Either way, it makes the outlines less interesting to look at, so apologies if you wanted to use the Outlines render for something and find it doesn't look particularly snowy- that's showbiz.

      

   2. The colors gave me trouble, what's new? I gave it a lot of thought and I decided I would draw this one with cloudy winter lighting. You know in winter when the sky has been just nonstop gray clouds and you haven't seen the sun in days and the shadows on the ground are sorta vague and soft, that's what I wanted to aim for, that's why there are few crisp shadows here.

      The snow drifts were fun though, they're just a single thickly drawn line of blue with a crunchy brush which I blended into the snow. Simple and effective, I think, though I did quibble about how big and dark they should be for some time. I figured that bigger shadows on the drifts would give me more room to soften them up if I so wanted and somewhat lighter drifts would feel more in line with the soft shadows on the ruins. Sheesh, there's always a hundred things to consider when making maps, isn't there?