Rocky Coast, Adept (Patreon)

Hello there, Adepts- this is the Rocky Coast (25x30), featuring many rocks and a skinny, meandering path following the coastline. In a way this is a redo of an old map, the Rocky Shoreline, but I don't really consider it much of a remake considering how wildly different the two feel to me.. and that's not just because of the rotated frame, the terrain feels much more natural in this one. Anyway, let's talk about it!

Disclaimer: I have a nasty head cold, so this will be a little quicker of a Behind the Scenes post than usual- thanks for understanding.

I started this map with a hankerin' for drawing a coastline, and after looking back at my previous shore maps I wasn't terribly impressed. I decided to add a more natural coastline to the archives, which meant using aerial photography of coasts as reference. My takeaway from all the imagery I found was that I should probably be adding lots more rocks to my coastal maps, so that's what I did. The path does a good job of drawing the eye too, huh? I imagine the party traveling down the road when they see some trouble on the beach, weaving around the rocks as they approach. Sounds kinda fun, I think!

As it turns out, drawing lots of rocks takes a long time. It takes longer to arrange them in ways that feels natural, even when using reference. I think I've talked about this a lot recently, but since I've recently been trying to populate my maps more thoroughly with props it's something I've had to spend significantly more time on. It's all part of the process, I just have to get better at it so I can be faster about it

Also, it's good that I drew up all those little ledges last week, they were extremely easy to drop in to this map when I was feeling like it seemed a bit flat. Good job, me!

You'd think I'd be more confident about coloring maps since I've been doing it for several years, but as it turns out I think I'm actually getting less sure about colors and lighting as time goes on. I must second guess myself 10 times more now than I ever used to when I started. Partially that's because I now check how the map's colors look on different devices, meaning I tend to wrap up maps by glancing at them on my 2 desktop monitors, in thumbnail form, and on my iphone. If any of those views looks unbalanced then I go back in and tweak it until I'm happy. But here's the thing, I'm rarely satisfied so it takes a long long time. I'm looking forward to the day I nail a map's colors and lighting on the first try purely by accident, that'll be sweet.