Feywild Hilltop, Adept (Patreon)

This week I made the Feywild Hilltop (30x30), a massive rocky hill in a magical forest- perfect for thrilling encounters against the kind of enemies that hang out on top of big hills, like brooding baddies or whatever critters like to admire the sights.

Your alternate version of this map has another tree in it, look at that! I bet it's an important tree if I went out of my way to make a whole different jpg for it, so you'd better use it or else I'd look like a moron.

A little minimal around the edges maybe but I've drawn a few forests in my time so I think I can get away with improvising a few here and there. The star of the show here is the hill, which I really wanted to come across mainly in the lighting and shading rather than just the ledges themselves, so I decided to place them a little sporadically.. more so in the final version than here at the beginning where, as you can tell, they're placed pretty regularly.

I toyed around with adding a path here as well, which I eventually decided was a little too on the nose. Instead I made it much patchier up until it completely fades away, which feels more like something you'd find in the forest.

Wow, I really hate drawing roots. I don't even know why it bugs me so much, they're not that different than branches, but I guess it's more that I feel they should look like they're entering the ground and that's not very easy to express. Maybe instead I should focus less on that sort of thing and just let the viewers' imagination do the work of making the lines make sense.

I'm honing in on that Fey palette, week after week. This one is a little more hazy with a greater emphasis on colorful treetops rather than brightly colored grass. The grass in last week's map was a bit grating to me after looking at it for a while, so I figured I ought to try expressing the Fey vibe through other means, moving the bright colors to the trees while trying to make everything feel more dreamlike with hazy lighting and increased fog around the edges. I think the haziness looks nice but I get the feeling I'll tone down the pinks in the trees a little further for the next one. Call it a hunch.