Sacred Pool Adept, ft. James' RPG Art (Patreon)

This week's map is the Sacred Pool (40x45), featuring art by James' RPG Art! It's been a little while since we've worked together and I really enjoyed doing a collaboration again- it's nice sometimes to be pushed a little out of your comfort zone and I'll almost never draw statues into my maps unless prompted to do so. Check out his library of paintings on his Instagram.

So, in addition to getting some cool paintings courtesy of James and renders of the base day/night versions without the statue, your alternate version is Enchanted, with crazy colors like a black light painting. Kinda feels fey, but I don't think it limits you to Feywild encounters. 

0. Initial sketch. This is what I sent to James after we settled on what the map would be of, a couple weeks ago. I wasn't too excited about the bottom of the map however and decided to return to it later when the time came.  

1. Much better! This one featured lots of extra terrain, perfect for prompting enemies and players to utilize the elevation to their advantage. My only regret at this point is that I didn't widen the frame any further, some of the pathways along the edges of the map feel a little cramped for space, which wasn't really what I had in mind. Worse yet, it looks like I was trying to cram too much into too small a frame, an issue which makes it feel like I drew the map to fit into the frame. That is to say, I would rather the image feel like I took an aerial photo of an interesting location, not like I drew a cool picture and tried to fit it all into the frame. 

2. Outlines! As I often mention in these posts, rock walls are the worst, but they could be worse. Say, if they had waterfalls going down them and therefore needed to have perspective that made sense. On an unrelated note, it took me 3 days to start drawing anything other than rock walls and waterfalls. 

But yeah, the waterfalls killed me a little. I'll be the first to say that my rock walls don't make much topological sense, but that isn't going to stop me from drawing them like this even so- they still read as rocky escarpments and that's what's really important here. It's just that sometimes certain additions to the map break my brain and send me spiraling. Trees, rocks, grass, keep it up- you're my road dogs, never change. Could they be more realistic? Yeah, absolutely, but it's really quick to draw all of them as I do and that's as good as it gets.

By the way, the statue is Apollo Belvedere with added angel wings (there are some 3D scans of it online which were extremely useful as reference). I originally had it looking like one of the goddess statues from Breath of the Wild, then I saw James' painting with Apollo here and I had to acknowledge that it was a bit cooler and much more dramatic.

3. For the colors I wanted to make sure I was sticking to the palette I have established for these Haunted map I've been making. But, each one has turned out a little different as I try out slightly altered palettes, so I looked at all of them and decided which I preferred. After some consideration I picked the Haunted Chasm, and so I modeled this map's colors after it. Should I probably have discussed my color choices with James? Oh yes, absolutely. But it's been a busy week so I wasn't communicating nearly as well as I should have.