Haunted Stream, Adept

Hi Adepts! This one is the Haunted Stream (50x50), a jumbo-sized map with lots of room to move around. It's so big that I actually had a hard time making sure each part felt appropriately detailed, but I think it pulled through eventually. We'll talk more about that below.

Your alternate version is another Unhaunted variant! I took a few weeks off on this style of variant to work out some kinks, I wasn't entirely happy with how the last one turned out and took some time to think more about how I wanted to move forward on it. It's a little tricky because I make these Unhaunted by layering lighting effects on top of the regular Haunted one, which is sorta backwards for me, but I think I'm getting decent result so far!

1. Big map. I used a stock photo of a forest stream as reference here, with a few extra additions to spice things up. I've been doing a little bit of study on forest   Originally I was planning on this being some kind of mystical, glowing, spectral river, with all kinds of magical effects in the water, but after a while I decided that a river that interesting would have to be a littler larger than this. As is, this tiny stream isn't terribly impressive in size, so a more subtle map would be more appropriate. 

2. Lots of work for this one, due to the increased size, but overall I think I managed to put it together fairly quickly. I thought I'd have a much harder time, actually, due to all the rock walls and grass, and it did suck, but I threw my phone across the room and forced myself to deal with the rock walls until they were finished. 

After that I decided to try something new with the water/shore. Instead of smooth swooping lines to depict the sand I went with something much more crunchy. It felt more correct to me for a little stream like this to have a shoreline like this, not quite as gentle as an ocean shoreline. 

Also, as a side note, I've been drawing grass a little differently recently, like for the last 2 maps. I was starting to feel like the old way was needlessly eye-catching, and since I always toned it down to be less bold anyway I figured that I might as well think of an alternative. I stumbled across the game Cozy Grove on Steam, which might not be the kind of game I would usually play, but the art is amazing and the way they depict grass felt perfect to me, so I've been aiming for something similar- little tufts instead of long, wiggly lines. So far, so good!

3. Colors! Strangely enough I had a somewhat hard time coloring this one- the Haunted palette just wasn't coming together easily here. I think it might have something to do with the extra water and sand, though that shouldn't really much much of a difference. Perhaps it was the increased size? Maybe my eye wanted there to be more of the vignette further into the image (which I added), and that's why it took me so much longer to color/shade here. Either way, I managed eventually, 2 days later than I'd like but still. 

I think I'll need to do something small next, for my sake.