Oct 2016 Challenge: Vampire's Mansion

[damonjynx]

Nice work. I particularly like the way you've done the stairs and colouring, excellent job.

[RjBeals]

your perspective and shadows are amazing - I love this, great work!

[Greg]

Lovely illustrative work on this, Matt. Colours, shadows, perspective, I think you've just about got everything nicely done in this piece!

I particularly love the breakdowns of the floors though, which although very simple, add a lot more depth to the piece. Great work here!

[fol2dol]

This is amazing, everything is so neat!
I love the colors and shadows!!

[arsheesh]

Fantastic work on the perspective. The line-work is neat and the color choice is splendid. All in all a fantastic entry.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[mat_r]

You guys are so kind... Thank you, everyone!
It has been great fun doing this and I am happy that everything worked out the way I had it in my mind before I started. (more or less, haha)

[Ilanthar]

Wow, fantastic work Matt! Nice colors, layout and clean floorplans. The illustration is really beautiful.

[7Sided]

Wow! So awesome! Definitely loving the color. You did a great job texturing it so it doesn't make the image look too flat. I'm just curious how you did the line artwork once you had your isometric "sketch." Did you freehand this with a tablet or use vectors? The line work looks very sharp and very straight lines. The isometric circles makes me think it was vector. Just curious... Great job!

[mat_r]

Thank you very much Ilanthar & 7Sided

It is all drawn with a tablet, no vectors. At that level of detail, making a pixel based drawing is much faster in my opinion. However, Photoshop offers a couple of tools that greatly help your accuracy - the two most important ones being:

1. SHIFT + klick makes perfectly straight lines. This is extremely helpful in drawings where a lot of lines follow a fixed grid. (However, I think it is good advice not to overdo it with those and to throw some freehanded lines into the mix, since that makes the drawing more vibrant.
2. For ellipses/circles: There is the ellipse tool. This can create both paths, vector based shapes and pixel based shapes. It doesn't make much of a difference which one you choose in my opinion. I prefer pixels, since they are more convenient for editing in a drawing-workflow. (for example you can easily erase parts of them etc..)

[Gamerprinter]

Thank you very much Ilanthar & 7Sided

It is all drawn with a tablet, no vectors. At that level of detail, making a pixel based drawing is much faster in my opinion. However, Photoshop offers a couple of tools that greatly help your accuracy - the two most important ones being:

1. SHIFT + klick makes perfectly straight lines. This is extremely helpful in drawings where a lot of lines follow a fixed grid. (However, I think it is good advice not to overdo it with those and to throw some freehanded lines into the mix, since that makes the drawing more vibrant.
2. For ellipses/circles: There is the ellipse tool. This can create both paths, vector based shapes and pixel based shapes. It doesn't make much of a difference which one you choose in my opinion. I prefer pixels, since they are more convenient for editing in a drawing-workflow. (for example you can easily erase parts of them etc..)

Just so you know I prefer vector to image editors, though I don't use Illustrator, I use Xara Designer Pro x11. That said, it depends on your application. Xara allows me to erase or paint vector shapes, in addition to using the drawing tool, which I prefer. While my current vampiric star ship definitely shows its vector origins, especially in use of one-directional extrusion which I applied to the exo-skeleton hull shown on the top deck level, many of my maps look as if it could have been created in Photoshop, though again, I use vectors exclusively and no image editing in my work. Nothing wrong with your approach and application preference, I just wanted to note some of the reasons you describe in your post as to your preference using pixels instead of drawn shapes, I can do those same functions in vector as well - those techniques can be done in vector as well as image editors.

One of the main reasons I prefer vector (aside from the fact as a traditional artist I prefer to draw and not to paint) is that with vector, pixels are meaningless until I export to an image format (JPG, PNG, TIF, etc). The same map design can be exported to a 300 dpi printed map, or used as a 72 dpi virtual tabletop application at the same scale. I can also reduce a map's scale to export to a smaller format if I need it. With an image editor (such as GIMP or Photoshop) you have to commit to a specific pixel scale, and cannot really create 300 dpi output using a 100 ppi design scale.

While I am certainly skilled at using Photoshop (for other purposes than mapping), the only time I use Photoshop in map design process at all, is when a client publisher is using a Mac and expect a high resolution, layered PSD file as the final format. I create and export the file from Xara, then just to insure compatibility for Mac based PSD files, I open my exported PSD in Photoshop CC, and save it again - that's the only time I use Photoshop at all in my work. Also I often hand-draw line work, then import to Xara, apply a "merge layer" transparency onto the hand-drawn work, and place vector shapes beneath the line work, creating a kind of hybrid pixel/vector creation.

Incidentally, though I don't a tablet (though I have one) Xara works perfectly well with a tablet including using pressure to create shaped lines is completely possible and easy to do.