Island Shrine, Behind the Scenes

Welcome back for this week's Behind the Scenes! This ended up being an interesting one for a couple reasons, so lets get to it.

1. The first rough sketch. If anything, it's less pretty than usual (not that it matters horribly). As you can tell a lot of changes took place after this: the shape of the island, the shrine, the boat's gone, the little fragment island is missing a couple features, the trees are gone. I just didn't feel like these things added enough, so they were scrapped for the sake of keeping things simple and improving the flow of the map.

2. A lot of the things I didn't like about the rough sketch came up as soon as I put down lines for the edges of the island. Just looking at this, it's pretty boring. Only 1 ramp up to the top of the island? That's lame and feels unnatural. 

The other thing of note here is I put down way too many lines for the rock faces. I got in the zone and didn't realize I didn't like it until it was done; definitely a big waste of time that I plan on skipping in the future. 

3. Detailed outlines. I scooped out another ramp up to the top of the plateau over on the left side and placed some bushes, rocks, and grass where I felt it worked. My goal for this map was to have more open space but still have a nice flow. I think the shrine came out pretty well, I decided to leave the interior up to the GM's discretion. Is it a walled in shack, or perhaps it's a roof propped up on 4 pillars? I intend on implying as little as possible in my maps, I don't want to put in setpieces that are difficult to explain away if they don't make sense to your stories. A mysterious structure on an island though? Pretty rad I think ;)

4. Color, blam! Look at that awful basin-thing on the little island, ew. It looks like Ringo's Microsoft Paint art. It definitely never lasted long and only sprung up for this stage because I drew it in the rough sketch. Other than that, I didn't much like how different the sand and the rock walls' colors were, so they drew closer together as I worked.

5. Detailed colors, finishing touches. I like this stage, it doesn't really feel good until this step. The shadows always do it, they give it just the littlest 3D pop. Also, the details are a little less detailed this time around because my tablet's stylus broke just as I started :( RIP little guy. This is about the best I can do with my mouse, which is honestly better than I expected.

Ok ok, I know this is the last step I have here, but look at the finished product to see that the bridge is gone. It just didn't feel right still, and I can't say I tried too hard to make it work. Partially because I couldn't make up a reason why someone would put a bridge there in the first place, partially because it was a big pain to redraw it. 

Ok, that's all I've got this week! I can't start on my next map until my new stylus comes in the mail, but hopefully that's soon. I'll be posting again by next week Friday either way though, so I'll see you then!