Skull Cavern, Adept (Patreon)

This week's map is the Skull Cavern (25x35), which features a giant dragon skull surrounded by rocky platforms and lots of lava! This one was inspired by Dodongo's Cavern in Ocarina of Time, which had a similar entrance theme with a handful of platforms before a giant skull- pretty rad I think. 

Anyway, your alternate version of this map is called 'Slate', which means I swapped out the brown rock for gray and did a little retouching of the skull's color as well, which makes it stand out really well and looks very dramatic. The contrast here is very neat, so while this version doesn't have a lot of different uses than the original, I can see this being one you use just as personal preference. 

1. I like to keep the design for Volcanic maps fairly simple, since the draw of this kind of map is the dangerous terrain and hazards. That's just my opinion though, I've seen many maps by other artists which emphasize huge changes in elevation and I think those also feel very cool, but this is just my preference. 

Anyway! When I laid out the positions and sizes of the rocky platforms I decided that I wanted to utilize a somewhat random/natural layout, so I tried not to put too much thought into where I was drawing them. My only real concern was that there would be parts of each platform that are close enough to nearby platforms that adventurers could reasonably jump from one to another. 

2. Outlines! As I've mentioned many times over in these little Behind the Scenes posts, I always try to find ways to reuse old assets as much as possible, either through reusing props I've put a lot of effort into or recycling patches of rock walls/ground/grass with additional tweaks so as to fit the current map. Unfortunately, I couldn't find many ways to save myself time for this one with old assets, so I got to work on the giant skull and fresh rock platforms. 

The skull was really what I wanted to spend time on though, drawing big ol' bones is a lot of fun. I started off by finding some reference- some 3D dragon skull models on Sketchfab. I really like using Sketchfab for reference since I can manipulate the models to get the angles that I want to see, and there's usually lots of fun fantasy content on there to spark the imagination. So, after finding lots of dragon skulls as inspiration, I drew the right side of the skull and mirrored it over, roughed up both sides in different ways, and added little details in a way that helped to express the 3D shape of the skull. 

3. As always, coloring always begins for me by finding a previous map with a palette similar to what I want to use- this time it was the Volcanic Path, which had a great glow to it that has stuck with me. I decided to be a little more subtle than that though, so I simply brought over the colors and added glowing effects on top in a more measured way. Also, I decided to put a little more thought into the shading than I usually do in Volcanic maps, putting the shadows of rocks/props on the side opposite the nearest lava, which made sense to me. 

The skull I did separately, since I has lots of little details that needed to be paid attention to carefully, instead of my usual rushed coloring jobs. Mostly, I made sure that the lighting on the horns made sense, and kept a nice bit of glow around the edges of the rest, which I feel helps the skull feel like a rounded object and not a flat image.