Forest Portal, Adept (Patreon)

Hi Adepts! This week's map is the Forest Portal (35x30), a particularly exciting map that includes active magic! I don't often add that kind of thing in my maps because sometimes you don't want someone else's magical effects clogging up your encounter, but I worked around that by doing a little extra legwork- I prepared 3 iterations of each variant featuring no magic, medium magic, and very magic. 

And that goes for your alternate version as well, which I'm calling Mystical. This one is a twist on the Night version, starring more vibrant nighttime colors and lighting as well as flashy pink magical effects replacing the blue ones. I thought the pink magic worked better with the night colors and lighting, and it does, so there you go!

1. The sketch here actually started much larger, a full 40x40 forest scene I was initially all about. In fact, I went so far as to nearly fully make the Day version of that 40x40 map, when suddenly I hated how that looked and zoomed the frame in to what you see here. Mainly I wasn't fond of how little of the image was taken up by the portal, it looked small and uninteresting. Thankfully I had a fairly easy time finding a new scale that looked balanced and centered, just coincidence that it looked right without needing major changes.

The idea I really wanted to go for with this sketch was that the portal is kinda hidden, located in a somewhat recessed part of the forest where obviously there used to be much activity (due to the fallen pillars), but also a location where people have perhaps visited recently- evident by the patchy dirt path leading up from the bottom of the frame. The initial sketch also featured a more traveled dirt path winding along the bottom of the frame, perpendicular to the portal stones- I didn't much like how that seemed to imply that this circle was just a few feet from a regular road and therefore wasn't very well hidden in the forest. 

2. My problem this week was that I started working on this map on Wednesday due to how long it took me to make my previous map. Thankfully I always know that I can whip up a solid forest map in much less time than any other setting, so I got to work placing my most recent batch of freshly-drawn trees. Beyond that I was planning on drawing up fresh rock walls but quickly discovered that that would be a major loss of time, so I brought in some stretches of wall from the Forest Cave Entrance and cut them into the correct shapes with some patching.

Side note- the runes on the portal stones are Norse runes! I, of course, only know of them from the Binding of Isaac, but I like the look of them and feel they look appropriately mystical (especially when glowing).

3. Colors! You'd think I'd stop messing around with my forest palette, but I can't stop myself- I swear I have a different opinion about what looks best every week. This time I went a little more yellow with it, leaving the trees a touch more blue for contrast. The runes I made even more cyan to help them stand out even further, alongside the magical effects. 

The portal, of course, was the trickiest part. When I had started the map I wasn't sure at all how I was going to depict the portal, I was half convinced I would end up scrapping the stones and instead draw in a big ol' archway with lots of glowing emanating from within. I decided against it eventually and started playing around with effects, hoping I'd come across something I'd like. 

I toyed with all kinds of filters, brushes, and colors, not really liking anything until I added a little vortex to the center of a glowing circle and I said, "hey, that's a portal!". However, it was still getting a little lost in all the lighting, but I eventually fixed that by adding some shadow around it for emphasis which also seemed to imply that the portal was sucking in the light nearby- spooky. Anyway, I'm pretty happy with it, not half bad!