Azuline Falls: August 2014 Challenge Map

[xpian]

Arlath is a mountainous island in a sea of unending clouds, a place of sunlight and peace surrounded by shadowy evil. It's a setting I'm using in my D&D campaign, serving as a temporary base for the players to rest and explore. I had begun drawing out the island itself, but I had envisioned an actual town being there and hadn't yet gotten around to mapping it yet. That was when the August 2014 challenge, "Around the Bend," came along.

Here is the work-in-progress of Arlath island. There's still quite a bit of finishing and labeling I intend to do on it before it's done:


The dual purpose of my August project became to create the town that would perch on the side of the island, straddling the waterfall, and also compete in the guild's challenge. Here is the full work in progress thread for the challenge, showing the map evolving step-by-step: ( http://www.cartographersguild.com/ma...es-arlath.html )

I was fortunate enough to win that month's challenge, but I wasn't quite done with the map. There were some areas that were rather sparse and brown, just begging for greenery and detail. Below, I present to you a more complete, more colorful, prettier version of that map.

I think I'm learning from every map I make to plan ahead in better ways. Next time I'll try to keep the detail work to just the important parts, while allowing the unimportant side areas to recede into obscurity, as they should. I have a tendency to get bogged down in the tiny minutiae, and I'm still trying to find the right balance between being satisfied with the look of the piece and spending my time efficiently.

The map was drawn in ProCreate on the iPad with an Adonit Jot Touch stylus. I did a bit of the overhead planning and faux-3d isometric transformations in Adobe Illustrator before drawing over them in ProCreate. Finally, the image was brought into Photoshop for the text labeling and a few touch-ups here and there.



Edit : There was a great deal of concern during the WIP thread about the clumsy or drunk citizens of Azuline Falls simply dropping off the dangerous cliffs and being swept away in a careless moment, never to be seen again. The civic-minded safety-conscious among you should now take heart: guard rails and fences have been installed along the more dangerous stretches, as well as a few hedges in some select locations.