City Park, Adept (Patreon)

Hello Adepts- I return! I took the last 2 weeks off for vacationing and attending weddings which were delayed by Covid and scheduled for the same week. But, I'm back now and I've got the City Park (24x34) for you- the promised addition to my last map, the Parkside Market. 

Your extra version of this map is a spooky Foggy version, which will be a great one to use for adding to the ambiance of being chased through a hedge maze by some kind of Frankenstein or Dracula. Enjoy!

1. The maze portion of this map was actually a fairly late addition- I had finished with much of the rest of the map when I decided that it could use some extra variety. So, for the sake of this post, I've combined my maze sketch with my initial sketch, to help show the layout I ended up deciding on. 

My plans for the mazes also changed once I started sketching. They were supposed to be similar in layout but with the path being slightly different, intended to confuse anyone who knew one side's solution and assumed the other would be the same (but mirrored). I eventually decided that that would be an extremely niche scenario and would also waste a ton of time as I would have needed to redraw a big portion of the other maze, so I settled for flipping the one side and altering some details so the duplication wouldn't be too terribly obvious. 

The rest of the map is pretty simple. I liked the thought of implying some kind of ponds or lakes adjacent to the courtyard, giving the impression of a large and scenic park. I didn't feel like it was very necessary to flesh out much of it however as it's not the focus of this one, just an extra detail that might spice up a few combats. 

2. Hedges. I knew that these bad boys would mean I'd spend a lot more time on this map than I was expecting, and I already had fewer days to work on it this week than usual. The real issues were the rounded hedges, which I wanted to keep consistently wide while also following an even curve around the courtyard. My solution was to create a series of ovals at even intervals emanating outward from the courtyard, each with a stroke the size of the hedge (about 1/2"). These gave me excellently consistent guides to draw along, without worrying about the spaces between growing too thin to travel through. 

3. For this map's colors I wanted to make sure that the palette remained fairly similar to the Parkside Market, which this map is supposed to be able to lead into (not seamlessly, but thematically). However, I realized that the palette I used for the previous map was somewhat more subdued than my usual verdant forest palette which felt more appropriate here, so I ended up doing something like a mix of the two. The result feels a little unusual, I think, maybe still to colorful in places than I might prefer, but it will do the job (especially since I was running very low on time when wrapping this up).