Apothecary Shop, Adept

Hello again, everyone- this week's map is the Apothecary Shop (12x16), a small storefront with a garden in the back, not a particularly extravagant operation but pretty good for a village apothecary. In a small town a place like this could easily be one of the more important locations for the villagers, potentially making it a hot spot for trouble and a likely place for passing adventurers to get involved.

For your alternate version I couldn't whipping up another spooky one, it's a compulsion really. Doesn't this feel like a cool place to hole up against undead hordes as they emerge from the fog? Or is that just in my head?

1. Another simple building, but we're getting more complex slowly but surely. I've been wanting to make my buildings a little more complicated, and this time I wanted to do that by making sure that the place wasn't primarily a single large room with every door branching off of it. So, as you can see, one room isn't attached to the storefront! Huge improvement, I know. But seriously, I'm looking into more interesting designs, so don't worry, they won't always be so small and simple.

2. This map was a little trickier than the last few because, as you can see, I had to draw in many more little details and props, things to fill shelves. This is another point where I start to get stumped, I know that I need to fill places with props but as soon as it's time to draw things on tables and shelves I blank and can't think of what anyone actually puts in their houses let alone an apothecary... bottles? Jars? Pieces of paper? Plants? I settled for putting just about anything I could think of on top of each surface, prioritizing small jars and bottles on the shelves so as to make it feel more like a shop that's stocked with herbs and other ingredients for healing.

3. Colors, nothing too crazy here. I tried to get more variety in the lighting and shading inside the building without making it look too shadowy like the Village Jailhouse. I tried adding an additional shadow layer on top of the map, above the outlines. It's a little magenta and very mild so as to not be too eyecatching, making a nice gradient from the yellow light at the windows to the very slightly purplish shadows in the corners. The way that I think this layer is an improvement isn't that it makes areas of the map darker but rather that it adds a sort of equalizing effect which makes everything in the area more the same shadowy purple/gray. I like how it looks here, but I think I can still put a little more effort into the lighting beyond that- there are a few places where the lighting feels a little too conspicuous like the store room. I think this is the main thing I'll be focusing on in my next building map.