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I'm back again with a new one, the River Crossing (30x30)- one of those maps where I have to stop and wonder if I'd made this exact map before, and I haven't, so here we are! It's simple, it's generic, and it looks pretty nice too, so I have to say I'm happy about it.

And your alternate version of this map is Fey! It's been a while, but somehow this felt like the correct way to go with this map. I didn't use any previous maps' palette as a starting point either, I just color corrected piece by piece until it felt right. I think it looks neat!

1. Nothing complicated here, a path winds towards a shallow spot in a river. I knew that most of the intrigue in this map would be in how I imply the shallow water, so I decided not to worry about anything until I had all the outlines on paper. 

The inspiration and layout for this map came from the Witcher 3 (probably not a surprise, I feel like I say that a lot), specifically that scene near the beginning where the griffin attacked the cart on a muddy path crossing a stream. I think that path was a bit less underwater than mine, but I thought that a clearing like that would make for an interesting map- lots of open sight-lines for ambushes, potential for environmental hazards. 

2. Most of this map was business as usual: I drew up rock walls to the size and shapes I needed, trees and rocks were dropped in from a handful of previous forest maps, water was quickly drawn in, grass takes a moment but I can mostly turn my brain off. 

The only point of interest here is the border between dirt path and water, since I wanted it to be a gradual and clean transition between the two as the path remains fairly shallow beneath the water. I started off by defining the border with an outline, using that line as the potential edge of the water, filled in that space with flat gray, and then hid it. With that done, the water could be later colored blue and partially erased to create the gradient I wanted with the dirt path underneath. Is this a lot of talk and over-explanation for something really straightforward? Yes, yes it is. Will that stop me from talking about it as if it was complicated and I'm smart for thinking it through? No, no it won't. 

3. As I've mentioned recently in other posts, specifically the ones for my forest maps, I've been stepping back my colors to more closely resemble some of my older palettes. I came back from paternity leave last year with, apparently, a ravenous desire for wildly over-saturated colors, and then spent much of the year making some maps which I would now say were sub-par. I'm feeling pretty good about where my colors are at now, however, and I plan on developing them in a more reasonable direction from here on out. My forest palette specifically is in a good place now, I think, and so I suppose I should take a look at some of my other environments again and see what work needs to be done. 

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