Lakeside Boathouse, Adept

This week's map is the Lakeside Boathouse (40x40), a large, autumnal map! This one is a little less urban than the last few, just a shack on the roadside with some boats and other woodsy props, enough setup for a little side combat while on the road or a hook for a bigger quest.

Your alternate variant for this one is a Jungle recolor and also a bonus variant without the props and house! Obviously you can just use this one instead of the base variant if you just need the terrain, but wouldn't it be weird if they stayed the night at the shack and woke up in the morning and it's nowhere to be found? I'm not sure if there's anything there to work with, but that would confuse the heck out of me, haha.

 1. A winding road by the waterfront is something I'm sure I've made several times before, but I almost never add buildings to maps like this and there's no way I've ever done one with autumnal colors. I liked the added bonus of including a little beach and dock to help fill out the space and give your players some reason to be here and make it a little more interesting than all the plain-ol' forest road maps I've already made.

Also, since I drew the main road so big I felt that some smaller paths winding off of it felt appropriate, especially since obviously someone lives here and maybe some people living off screen may use the dock (there are 3 boats after all). A small detail but I thought it gave the map a little bit of history and gave the impression that it's lived-in.

 2. I don't think there's much to discuss here about the outlines, I didn't altar the foundation of the map much and I didn't draw anything differently than usual.. though I suppose I did try to draw the water to be a little more different than the ground this time. Instead of having the water lines follow the contour of the water as usual I had the 'wave' lines end at the rock walls, which should help give the impression of waves more than the old style. I never put too much thought into detailing/painting the water since it feels off to draw in aspects of the map that are always in motion, but every once in a while the flatness of my water maps seems lazy, so here I am.

 3. Colors! Essentially the same colors as the last autumn map, with a few small tweaks here and there to help the colors mesh together better while remaining distinct. I tinted the trees to be slightly more similar in color to the grass while tinting some of the grass to be slightly more similar to the ground in a few places where the contrast was too jarring. I left the shadows a little more bold in places than normal also in order to brake up the colors a little and help express changes in height better. Honestly, smaller changes than it sounds, just honing in on little details in this autumn palette I've been working on, you know how I like to tweak small things like this around here.