Desert Canyons, Adept (Patreon)

This week's map is the Desert Canyons (35x40), a sort of rocky patch of desert with those tiered rock structures you see sometimes, so I guess this isn't really much of a canyon.. I'm realizing that I probably should have researched this type of environment a little more before making this map. Despite that, it looks cool and will certainly make for a fun combat!

The reason why I haven't made a map like this in the past is that I'm afraid of maps with lots of tiered levels of elevation. I haven't tried something like this in a very long time, as I recall getting quite a bit of negative feedback from my previous attempts citing how poorly the terrain reads. Specifically, I was told that no one could determine which parts of the map were supposed to be higher or lower. I've since attempted sketches of similar terrains but ultimately I decided to let it be while I work out the kinks behind the scenes. The development that made me try this out was the newer style of rock walls I've been practicing for a while now, which hides much of the walls' verticality behind layered horizontal lines (contour lines). I'm hoping this will look right to you and not just to me.

Now, while I'm fairly happy with how this looks (still a bit messy for my taste), the rock walls were, of course, massively annoying and time consuming to draw. Truly, one of the more obnoxious projects I've worked on in a while. I probably could have started with a simpler design or smaller frame but I suppose I egged myself on and made the project much bigger than it maybe should have been.

After finishing that, I moved on to the ground and its related props. The Desert Cave map from last week was important for these desert maps as I used it to try out a few details which largely I deemed successful. The ground details are fairly minimal, featuring mostly just the hints of rocks and crack as well as a few wiggly sand lines here and there to fill up larger spaces. I also enjoyed the addition of bushes to the array of desert flora I'm including now, which is in fact accurate for this type of desert I'm trying to depict- essentially the Mojave Desert. Honestly, I'm tempted to go even further with the plants- maybe I'll draw up a few Joshua trees for the next one? I honestly doubt Joshua trees would look like a tree when viewed from above but I'll give it a try.

As opposed to the last few desert maps, I decided to tint this one a little more red rather than yellow. Something about these rock formations felt like they'd be really striking as a sort of red rock reminiscent to the dusty reddish pink rocks in Monument Valley. I might not do more with this reddish tint moving forward but I felt like it was the right pick for this map. As always, I wish I could have leaned even harder into those colors but my first attempt looked absolutely crazy when I looked at it on my phone. It's crazy how different the colors and lighting of these maps look on different screens- I almost wish I never started double checking this sort of thing, it made life a lot easier when I just tried to make them look nice on my desktop.