Cliffside Ruins, Adept & Expert (Patreon)

Hello and welcome back Adepts and Experts! There are many more of you this week than last time so I'll take the opportunity to thank you from the bottom of my heart, all of you especially make this all work :) Anywho, this is where I give you a little play-by-play of this week's map and my thoughts about it, as well as your rewards (which are attached at the bottom).

1. As always, I start off with a rough sketch just to visualize what I've had in mind and make sure it all fits well together. I wanted to make a map with a lot of cover and verticality (it's good to have goals in mind) and I've been wanting to make something with an arena vibe to it. I doubt I'll make an actual arena for a while, but this fits the bill well. 

Other than that, you'll notice that there are a bunch of bushes here that didn't end up in the final product. I dislike bushes and trees but I intend on experimenting with ways to draw them better.

2. The first pass at outlines. You can see that the walls are all solid lines at this stage. I prefer to draw them this way and beat them up later because at this point everything is still liable to change if I don't like it (it's not worth putting in details if I'm not sure it will stick around).

The bushes are still here, though they don't last much longer after this. I think they just look boring, and while they fill up the space well they just don't feel right. 

3. And then outline details. Things start to feel more alive at this step. I've been looking at ways to make the rock details better (or at least faster to draw), but only little changes for now. I tried to spruce up the bushes with little hash marks and I think that turned out well, but I'm still not completely into them. 

4. BAM, color! Ok ok usually there's an extra step here, but I got caught up on making sure my layers were working well (grab my PSD below!) and I forgot to take a picture while everything was clean. 

I spent a lot of time tweaking the colors this time I just couldn't settle on something I liked. The grass went through lots and lots of color variations before I settled with a pretty average green. If you want, you can adjust the colors now that the PSD is available! If you can make it better than what I ended up with, then more power to you (send me a pic too, I'd like to see it!).