Science Fantasy Village/City Map - Making building and Terrains meld together

[Jobo]

Hello Everyone and thank you for the help!

New to the Guild and really drawing maps (or at least attempting to make quality ones). I wish I could move right into the question, but I feel a little context is needed. So I have been making a map in the past week for a village for my current game of Numenera that has just moved online. Anyway, the concept of the city is that it is a nomadic village built upon giant basically giraffe robots (Inspired by Horizon Zero Dawn's Tallneck. See one of the attached images for the inspiration). The landscape they are travelling through suppose to be a wide path carved through a forest or a wide grassland area (Think Eurasian Steppe).

Now onto the problem...

My problem that I have is that I am lost in terms of making the terrain meld together with the ground in a convincing way. The current drawing and everything was hand drawn and I am lost in finding a way to do the same with terrain. So as you can probably guess from the upload of my current map, I have used Wilbur to make a height map and color it, but it looks almost too real compared to the buildings/robot giraffes (see. context!). For additional info I am using Photoshop CS6 to draw everything so far.

I appreciate any guidance and assistance that can be provided. Thanks to everyone for their time in replying.

[Larb]

It's because the two styles are very different so they clash with one another. Really you're going to want to draw the terrain the same way/in the same style you did the buildings.

Also what will really give them a sense of height is adding some tall shadows.

[Jobo]

Thank you for the reply!

Tall Shadows I can probably do, the terrain... I am quite lost on. Any resources you can point me toward that might lead to making terrain that more matches the style?

Sadly, my search in the tutorial area led me to attempting the current one, which as you mentioned, doesn't really fit.

[XCali]

Hmmm, I feel this has to do with the color temperature or at the very least, the shadows.

Anyway, it is bit hard to explain, so I quickly took your image and roughly added a selection over the one machine. I added Cast shadows and then the darker Core shadows closer to the object. I probably got the type of shadow a robot would throw wrong, but I did it for proof of concept.
I did play with the Color Temperature inside the selection. Just to see what it would do.
Concept.jpeg

Okay, I just played with the image to get my meaning over. (This is if you don't want to change the terrain.) So, hopefully it gives you an idea where to go.

It was like 10minutes, so it is not super complicated to make a change like that. If you have questions, be sure to ask.

[Rochnan]

Hey Jobo,

I basically took xCali's idea and ran with it:
Jobo.jpg

So the basics of it: if you want something grounded within a context, have it interact with the context.
In this case it interacts with the light by casting shadows. I also added some dust clouds for good measure.

(For the shadows I used a very messy cutout of the Tallneck concept -hooray for the magnetic lasso tool )