Little Market, Adept

I'm back this week with my second mini urban map, the Little Market (16x11), building on last week's Narrow Alleys with a few more compact city spaces. This is a little more cluttered than the last, so I thought it might be nice if I prepared another version with most of the market props removed, which is your variant for this week! You might think I planned for this variant from the start, right? It actually was the final version of this map I made, so I had to some unexpected surgery to excise the props and things that were filling up the middle of the map. Honestly though, this feels like an obvious variant that I should have seen coming from the start, but sometimes I amaze myself with my lack of foresight.

1. Yup, that's about it! When drawing courtyards you tend to just throw in barely enough buildings to imply that there's a city out of frame somewhere. If I'm feeling spicy I'll try to imply that the out-of-frame city is kinda cool-looking, with interesting buildings, balconies, and canals. Obviously I wasn't feeling spicy this week.

The market was intended to feel like a small farmers market, with a few buckets of produce scattered around and extra stalls lining the road leading up to the market proper. Which reminds me, I paid extra attention to how the buildings and stalls were placed this time so as to allow cross-traffic into and through the market. Nothing crazy, I didn't want it to look like a major thoroughfare, but enough room for some carts maybe, even with the stalls blocking part of the way.

2. Thank goodness I planned ahead last week and put aside the unaltered roof textures I had drawn. That saved a lot of time, fortunately, since I was very very busy this week otherwise.. and will be next week too. Yikes. But anyway, I used those pieces of roof to whip up a few buildings real quick, with some little details which I think spice them up nicely, like support beams and moss (which as really grown on me, much like the buildings). I'm starting to realize that details like these are vital for making the roofs in urban maps have an impression of personality, which I feel might be what my old urban maps were missing.

3. The colors here are.. fine. I tweaked the roof colors dozens of times and I had at least 10 different layers of tent colors with varying levels of saturation. It boils down to how vibrant I want my urban maps to be and I just can't come to a decision because I love both vibrant and subdued city maps from other mapmakers. It's hard to choose a lane, I suppose, and that's been making coloring tricky because my opinion changes every time I take a break and return to my desk. Anyway, last week's Narrow Alleys was a little more subdued than this and I can't decide if I was on the right track then or now. I swear to god I'm more decisive in my day-to-day life than this, there's just something about my own art that brings out the worst in me.