Stable Cottage, Adept

Hello again, Adepts! This week's map is the Stable Cottage (17x15), a simple map but one which I assume will be highly used- in what fantasy world are stables not a staple and are at least mentioned in passing if not a regularly visited location? Now when your local stable becomes a hotspot for rascally adventurers you will be ready for things to get physical.. perhaps because your party is dabbling in horse-theft but that's life, right?

1. As I work on my approach to drawing buildings, I want to keep things small so I can work on the basics without feeling rushed to meet my weekly deadline. With that as my goal, I've been going down the list of evergreen fantasy RPG locations, so of course a stable is the 2nd I knock off the list.

As with all building maps the first step is research, so I looked into medieval stables and what they might look like, finding some very simple and straightforward designs that I liked the look of. Another good resource is googling toy or model versions of the buildings I want to draw, this often leads to awfully detailed designs that are very helpful as inspiration as often these toys have flip-up roofs that allow an incredibly handy top-down view of the inside. Moving on, I don't know if anyone would build their house attached to their horse stables, but it felt plausible enough and would add some much-needed complexity to what would otherwise be an excessively simple map.

2. As with last week's map, I forced myself to put aside any digital tools and shortcuts that would allow me to create perfectly straight lines, instead vowing to freehand everything with the aid of grid lines which I would only use to ensure my lines weren't ridiculously crooked. What surprised me is how after just 2 weeks of doing this my lines have started to kinda look like I've been using the straight line tool again, and while its fun to see such quick improvement in pen control it defeats the point in that the lines don't look as rough and organic as I'd like. I think I might have to change my pen sensitivity to allow more variation in line width for my next map, maybe that'll help get the result I'm looking for?

Also, I again tried to primarily draw all my props fresh for this one, but I did end up bringing in a couple crates and barrels from the Pub map because the thought of drawing all of them again bored me immensely. Otherwise, only new stuff, which is something I'm making myself do as practice for filling up the buildings I'm drawing.

3. My primary takeaway from coloring this map is the importance of preparing masks ahead of time. This is something I know I don't put enough stress on in my mapmaking because I missed the day of photoshop class in college where I would have learned about masks and I've been kinda ignoring them ever since, dabbling here and there and always being surprised by how helpful they probably are.

This time I set up a mask for the full map, one for the inside of the building, one for just the walls, and one for just the outside. This allowed shadows and lighting to be placed in the correct area without bleeding into the others, making the process a little more intentional and much quicker.

Also, do you like the background? I feel like it's kinda nice but primarily I just can't stand a stark white background so I had to add something. I haven't thought much about alternate backgrounds but it's one of the last things I do so I don't put much thought into it at all really. Anyway, it isn't grating and it isn't eyecatching, so I'll hold off on developing it further for now.