Flimsy Bridge, Adept (Patreon)

I'm back again with the Flimsy Bridge (30x30), a forest map that continues on the recent theme of locations with limiting terrain! Nah, I'm kidding, I just wanted to draw a forest again and one of you suggested a rickety plank bridge a while back.

Your alternate version of this map is Rainy, featuring some fairly heavy-handed rain effects. I just thought that it might feel nice and dramatic to have a fight on this terrible bridge in a rainstorm, and that's really it. Sometimes it's nice to whip up a map based on just a scene I have in mind, and I think that's nice.

1. So, someone suggested this concept for a map a little while ago and I felt like it was a nice option for this week since I'm done with volcanos for the time being. 

The layout here ended up being a little tricky for multiple reasons. The size of the trench turned out to be a concern as I continued- I needed it to be large enough that the bridge has a purpose and so the trench feels deep, but I also didn't want it to take over the frame, since that would leave the rest of the image as little strips of land. The solution there is to simply increase the size of the map, but I'm a little short on time these days as I'm always keeping one eye on my 9-month old daughter while I'm working, so I restricted it to 30x30. This, of course, performs the additional task in preserving my sanity as well, since a smaller frame limits how many rock lengths of rock walls I need to draw. 

That's my second problem with this map, drawing large rock walls is the pits. The perspective feels weird, they require too much careful attention, and the end product often feels wrong despite how much time was invested in them. 

2. Rock walls. Just the worst. I spend so much time making sure these things don't have wonky perspective or are under/over detailed, and then I draw the rest in half an afternoon. Maybe I need to work on an easier way of drawing them, like last week's cave walls, but it feels like I've been doing things this way awfully long for me to turn around and do something else at this point. 

Also, I hate to dangle cut content in front of you, but I was kicking around an alternate version of this map with about half as many planks on the bridge, making it even flimsier than it is now. I thought that it might make a half-decent alternate version, but the end result looked a little underwhelming, like I was churning out quick content. Boo.

3. And here's my real stumbling block with this map. I decided to look back at my forest maps and I've decided that I overdid it with my recent hyper-colorful forest. I'm going to try to take it all a step back toward the glory days of forest map, but not all the way- many of those maps were terribly washed-out and desperately needed rebalancing. I'm thinking of landing somewhere in-between, but I'm not certain that this week's coloring it quite there yet. Certainly I need to take a look at my shadows, since they ended up being kinda overly soft in places and too hard in others. I think I'm going to have to make another forest map this week, just to try to figure some things out, so check in a few days to see how it went.