August 2014 Challenge: The Shelves of Arlath

[lostatsea]

Cool map! I don't think there would be any taverns here. One too many ales and Oops there you go !

[Bogie]

Excellent! This would be a great home village for the adventurers to start from.

[Diamond]

Looking great! I really love the preciseness of your linework.

[xpian]

@lostatsea - I was thinking I might add some hedges here and there to keep that from happening.

@Bogie - Thanks! I was thinking the same thing. My PCs are about to visit there.

[xpian]

I've added the castle that dominates the west side of town, as well as the gate below that leads to the tunnels to access the castle. These aren't dank, musty tunnels. These are nice tunnels. With ramps.

The buildings will look much prettier, soon. There will be foliage. There will be foamy whitewater.

Mostly, you'll notice I'm starting to lay in some basic color tones so that I'll have a foundation for shadow, highlight, and texture painting later.

I'm learning to keep one eye on the clock (deadlines!) so that I don't get bogged down with some fine details and wind up running out of time to finish...

### Latest WIP ###
Shelves-of-Arlath_v5.jpg

[xpian]

...in which I add more color, more detail, fix some problems, and experiment with Mike Schley's patented "halo around the inks" technique.

### Latest WIP ###
Shelves-of-Arlath_v6.jpg

[lostatsea]

In general it looks great but I think the river above the large falls(TOP) is out of perspective . Seems with the existing terrain immediately around it that it should appear flatter.

[xpian]

@lostatsea - I see what you mean. Thanks for the feedback!

[xpian]

Had to work out how to do some decent-looking windows on the buildings when drawn at this scale. The size of the pixels means that I can't just sketch in some rectangles and have them look good (or so I believe). I think these are getting there.

Lots of little clean-up and finishing tweaks on some of the architecture that I'd put off working on. This includes making sure people could actually access each level without needing to scale the cliffs...

And then I'd get drawn into more cliff detailing...

Now is the time to leave the detail work aside for a bit and work on the border, legend, text labels, and coloring/shadows/highlights. Wow. When I list it out like that, it sounds like a lot.

### Latest WIP ###
Shelves of Arlath_v7.jpg

[xpian]

Adding the title bar, blocks for legend and other info, lots of little details here and there, as well as foliage up at the top. More info and foliage to come. Also, beginning to think about shadows, highlights, and overall contrast.

### Latest WIP ###
Shelves-of-Arlath_v8.jpg