Crumbling Farm, Adept

Hello folks, this week's map is the Crumbling Farm (30x40), a straightforward crossroads map with lots fun bits of terrain to work with. We've got hedge rows, stone walls, the ruins of an old farm building, and a winding creek as obstacles alongside the wide open fields (which may be full of sheep, if you want, which are obstacles of a different sort) and roads which offer clear line of sight for ranged battle. All this to say, I think it's a nice little map and I had fun making it!

Also, I made you a bonus Sunset variant go alongside the Foggy one because it felt right for this map. Enjoy!

  1. Crossroads maps are honestly some of the first that come to mind when I consider new maps. So, I sketched out the first one that came to mind and worked on the outlines for a day until I realized that I had made almost the exact same one before. Coming up with a new layout put me behind schedule a fair bit, but I adapted a lot of what I had drawn up into this new design.

Anyway, this was a major improvement because I ended up adding the creek and buildings alongside the fields and forest, which added a lot of complexity to the map. In hindsight though, I should have also added a bit more to the forest at the bottom, like more ruined farm buildings or rubble or maybe some rock ledges would have been nice. Just a little plain, I think.

 2. Outlines! I wanted to do a couple things different here- I reduced the detail on the road and made the outlines of the grass more irregular so as to make them look less like the trees' outlines, also I gave the grass in the fields a little more shape than I normally do in an attempt to make the space feel less empty. Overall, some minor changes but substantial enough in that they made detailing come together a bit quicker than usual. I'll think more about the effect these changes made on the map, but I can tell already that the grass changes are good but the the road/ground details will need more work. A little too flat in the finished map, I think. Maybe it would look better if I painted in more detail?

 3. Yup, another attempt at an autumn palette. I feel like I go through this every year- I look back at my last attempt at an autumn map and I say 'that's not right, that's not what a forest actually looks like in autumn'. Then I proceed to make yet another map that I'll dislike in a month due to crazy color decisions. This is probably the case here once again, though not as much as usual and probably because I'm a little out of practice since I'm just now returning from paternity leave.

Primarily I think the lighting on the trees is just a little off, the shadows a bit too deep and the highlights too smooth and underwhelming. The water also isn't quite right yet, maybe too blue? The shoreline too eyecatching? The grass, rocks, and ground look nice though, no notes there, which is good because that's the majority of the map.

In short, this is an acceptable first attempt at this revised palette and therefore would be great groundwork for future iterations. The question now is whether I can warrant making more autumn forest maps when I spent around 7 months of the last year making spooky forest maps. Probably not, I probably went through a lot of goodwill among my patrons with that move. Maybe it's time to get back into urban maps? Tropical maps? Individual buildings?