Autumn Stream, Adept

This week's map is the Autumn Stream (40x40), a lovely little forest map with pleasant colors and lighting as well as a straightforward layout. An all around simple and cheerful map, I'd say, which are my personal favorites!

Your alternate version of this map is called 'Split', by the way, by which I mean it features the regular Day map on the left but with foggy, spooky effects on the right. Maybe some evil magic is creeping across the land from that direction? I guess your party ought to go check it out, huh?

 1. Like I said, simple stuff. I honestly don't think I've ever made a map with this type of layout before- a winding stream beside a dirt road (though I'm sure someone will inform me of how wrong I am if I'm mistaken). Like I mentioned last week, I'm trying to wrap up this month's 4 maps early so I can take some time off for the holidays (the last 2 weeks of the month hopefully), so I intend on only making maps which I can potentially finish a day or 2 early. Forest maps are my bread-and-butter, and I always know I can knock one out in 3 or 4 days under ideal conditions, so whipping up a map concept that I've had in the back of my mind seemed the perfect set up.

 2. I was trying to draw the water in the style I've been using recently in the past few tropical maps but I felt that it wasn't looking quite right here. I tweaked it several times but never felt that I was getting any closer to something I was happy with. Honestly, I felt like the tinted water lines didn't particularly work with the little stream like it did with the ocean water, though I don't really know why. I'll have to work on that a bit more in the future, but it probably won't come up in the meantime.

 3. I took a look back at the last few autumn maps I made and I wasn't really impressed. I had felt that I ended on a high note but honestly it wasn't great. They looked washed out, overly yellow, and kinda ugly. Just all around not very impressive, so I tried to take another crack at it and work on the major points I had grips about- too yellow and washed out. I think the main thing was swapping out the grass's color for something a little more fitting, more a pale green, which is more realistic I think than vibrant yellow grass. Lots of little changes beyond that, but I'm not sure about many of them yet, I'll have to sit on it for a day or 2 before I'll know what did and didn't work here.