The Arcane Academy

[Moe]

This was my July/August Lite Challenge Entry: The Arcane Academy.
The process of creation can be found in the original Thread.

During the challenge I changed my initial plan (as I often tend to do) of texturing the whole Academy. In the end the textures worked as a basis to change the style into a parchment page. Artifacts of the textures can be found while looking closely at the 'old tome' page. Basicly the map consists of three parts. The old version acting as reference to the builders, the blueprint which was created to have a new version and a letter.

The floorplan of the building was made using Illustrator. In the process I tried to repeat certain figures and motives such as the number 12 (in the end two pillars got lost, so there are only 10... shame on me!) which should indicate some kind of 'sense' behind the architecture and was linked to the backstory. There are a lot of lines followed by 'the architect' using a white slate pencil which developed a lot of 'shocking' symbols Talking about the backstory: at one point it turned out that it was impossible to include all of it as it seemed to grow with every single line I drew. So the rest of it appeared within the letter Robard van Erestria wrote to his wife and some scribbling on the ancient page by an unknown author. The rest is up to the imagination of the observer.

After finishing my work in Illustrator the rest was done entirely in Photoshop creating some patterns and textures by myself. The three parts were arranged to an overall picture and I did some nodge work and shading.

I have to thank everybody who helped me along the way especially with my writing as I am not a native speaker and there where some issues in grammar and style.
Even though this is a finished map I appreciate any critique as I try always to improve (e.g. seal and pen could be of better quality).

Kindly,
>Moe