Desert Canyon Bridges, Adept (Patreon)

Hello Adepts! This week's map is the Desert Canyon Bridges (35x35), a collaboration with Miscellanea Maps, who made the dungeon half of this map! I recommend you check out their work, I'm a big fan of their style, and I'm confident many of you will be too. Anyway, they made several extra versions of this map for their patrons, so if you want more content, then just head on over there!

1. So, the original idea for this map came from Miscellanea, who sketched out a couple of options for our collaboration. I thought this one was particularly interesting, (and lacking in trees, which I know some of you would appreciate) and we got to work. To start off, I sketched out my canyon, keeping the scale in mind so that they would have plenty of room for their dungeon overhead and on the wings of the map. Once we had settled on the scale I sent on my sketch so they could reference it for their dungeon, and I vowed not to stray too far from my sketch, so as to not make issues later on. 

2. I probably could have grabbed bits and pieces of rock walls from other maps and somehow strung them together, but that sounded like almost as much work as just making some fresh ones, and even if it did save time, there's a good chance that the angles wouldn't have turned out quite right and I'd have to start over anyway.  So, that took a little while, after which I immediately started adding all kinds of cracks and things to the ground. In hindsight, I was originally planning on making the floor of the canyon sandy, with small dunes leading down to the stream, but the thought didn't even cross my mind until after I had filled the ground with craggy, rocky details. At that point I was already starting to fall behind, so I stuck with it. 

3. My original color concept of this map was much more gray and orange, which would have been fine (and matched many of my other desert maps), but Miscellanea shared a picture of Antelope Canyon's lighting and the colors struck me as much more exciting than those I was using, which inspired me to deepen my colors and try to make things a little more interesting. Unfortunately, I forgot to mention to Miscellanea that I was doing this, so when we checked in later we found that my new colors didn't mesh well with their palette since they were going off of the original concept. We got on the same page eventually and kept more open communication for the night version.