Forest Lair, Adept & Expert (Patreon)

Welcome back, Adepts and Experts! My alternate map for you this week is an unoccupied version of the Mage's Lair, so fill it up with whatever you like! 

1. The rough sketch was a little tough for this one. When I set out to make a tower map, I wasn't too sure what I'd do with it. The stairs turned out to be the trickiest part, as no matter where I places them I wasn't too happy with it (they always felt like they were in the way or were located in strange places that no one would actually put them). I decided to take a simple path though and not worry about it, though I still feel like spiral staircases are very very confusing to work with in maps and therefore will not be a staple in my future drawings. 

Beyond that, I like the circular layout, though it doesn't make for much room to maneuver. I actually had another floor planned as well, though I didn't have any good ideas for what to fill it with and I was also extremely short on time so it fell to the wayside. Maybe I'll come back to this map someday and add it as a cellar? 

2. As my second multi-level map, I decided to take another crack at some of the things I dislike from the first one, the Cozy Inn. I tried floorboards as a ground texture again, to much better results I think, though I'm unsure what I did differently this time. I've been drawing my walls much differently now than I used to, so the structure of the building feels much more satisfying now, and I have the thickness of the walls drawn much more realistically. 

3. The color was tricky, but mostly because of the way I layered my PSD. I chose to keep each level and all their props on different layers from each other, making consistent coloring and shading a bit of a slog. The plus side to this is now I can maneuver the different levels very easily, which made the rendering process fairly painless (though still annoyingly time consuming). All in all, multi-level maps are a huge pain and I'm definitely not looking forward to doing it again for the pirate ship maps in 2 weeks.