I wanted to try drawing a town/city with roofs, since I have not done that in a while, and I had a couple different town ideas that I wanted to explore.

The first idea I had was from St. Paul island. I thought the shape of the island was pretty cool, but wanted to see it as a peninsula instead of an island, so I traced over the outline and connected it to land before I started trying to figure out how the town would work.

I really just wanted a small set of roofs at first to test out some different styles.
peninsula1-6-Layout1 (3).jpg

When I started drawing though, I kept thinking that the townspeople would expand their town just a little more in one direction, and then a little more in another. Very quickly the whole southeast quadrant of the peninsula was developed. And then I thought these townsfolk would definitely want to maximize their land use and drain that brackish swamp in the northeast as well. They couldn't use it for farmland but they could probably expand even more...With over half the island now designated as city I decided to reign myself in and only commit to the lower right quadrant for now (the brown blobbed area), but it will still be too much city to show individual roofs, so I had to hunt around for another idea for roof studies.
peninsula2-6-test1 (3).png

Another idea I was looking at was a small community established near the top of a terraced hill, in a fairly hilly area. I was thinking something similar to the Andenes of South America, so I decided to be inspired by a photo of a place near Pisac, Peru.

I thought shadow and shading would probably be what makes or breaks this map, so when looking for a style I kept thinking about the black-and-white-on-a-gray-background maps that a few people have pursued recently (I think Sarinthus is doing one now, but there was at least one I remember seeing a few months (years?) ago).
For some reason those really make the sale for me (they kind of remind me of working with charcoal), and I wanted to see how the idea applies to roofs. My quick and dirty proof-of-concept is below. If you ignore the shadows going in wrong directions, missing shading/shadows, the lack of detail, and if you squint really hard through one eye while looking in another direction, you will probably see that there is some potential in there! Somewhere.

Taress-1-1-1-8.5x11-sketch5.jpg
It turned out quite a bit creepier than I thought, like an abandoned clay-mation model town or something. I still think the style is worth pursuing, just to see how it looks completed.


I will probably take a step back and really think through the layout of Taress first, since for the study I just drew whatever I thought I saw in the photo. The rest of the effort will be texturing and shading, hopefully it does not turn out too scary!