Pine Forest Help

[mtcarpentersr]

Hello! I need some help/feedback with a pine forest I'm working on.

The map I'm drawing is for my D&D group. There is a pine forest to the north that is very dense with very tall trees. I've seen lots of tutorials here and on the 'Net for how to ink a general purpose or deciduous forest, but I've not seen a whole lot on pine forests.

I think the way I've done the other two deciduous forest is okay. They look passable and they match the rendering on the mountains. I want the pine forest to match the way I did the deciduous forest, but as you can see from the screen shots the pine forest looks fairly weak. I can buff up the linework to mimic the deciduous forest on the west side to give it some feeling of shadow, like I did in the deciduous ones, but after that I'm lost.

I want this to look like traditional pen and ink (despite it being all digital ). I might color this later on, but I don't want coloring to carry the detail or the shadowing, so I want to use line to address the shapes and any shadowing done.

Please let me know what you think and if you have any tips for pine forest it would be greatly appreciated.

Pictures are: 1.) Overall View, 2.) Close Up of Deciduous Trees, 3,) Lame Pine Forest

[mtcarpentersr]

So, that bad, huh?

I'm continuing to stumble on through the fog and figure out the pine forest. I had a good friend suggest that the trunks of the trees were confusing, so I decided to remove them. This helps with being able to mimic the shadowing and shading on the deciduous forest, but I'm not happy with my draftmanship of the pine trees, or the shading. It also takes away from the idea that this has very old, tall trees. I'm trying to avoid drawing each tree for several reasons, the main one being that it won't match the other forests in look. I'm seriously thinking of erasing all the forests and just draw trees spread out, but covering the area, then try to shade the ground or something to communicate that it's all one large forest.

Would love to hear ANY feedback. Let me know what you think!

[Chashio]

Big differences I'm seeing (looking at the first post):
You have some longer/wider clumps of deciduous trees in the middle of the forest than you do with the conifers.
Also, no shadows under the conifer forest... I wouldn't necessarily try it as dark as the deciduous shadows but a lighter grey or hatching might help. May not need a shadow though. Looks pretty good as it is. Nice style.

Edit: Also, the treetops mid conifer forest are a little bit tall. Maybe try erasing the bottom 1/4 or 1/3.

[mtcarpentersr]

Chashio - Thank you for the feedback. I made the interior tree tops shorter as per your suggestion, spread them out a bit more, and I think it helped. I like your idea of matching the shadowing/drop shadow, but it's tricky. They tend to look blob like when I'm done.

I dropped some lettering in it and used some ruled lines to give it a bit of a dark look. Sort of a "design element". Translation: I'm lazy. XD But I think drawing each tree kills the look of the forest.

I realized the three forests were out of proportion to each other, so I tried to spread them out a bit. Trying really hard to make everything look like it matches.

[Chashio]

I think you're well on the way to achieving your goal.
Yes, the shorter treetops help, and I like what you did with the vertical hatching across the rest of the forest but I'm finding it a little hard to look at.
I took the liberty of dragging your latest update into photoshop and playing with things really quickly... one version just added a rough ground shadow, the other I used a clone stamp tool to pick up some of the treetops and scatter them over the canopy. Just for your consideration. It may not be what you want to go with or it may inspire something.

[Lingon]

The vertical hatching is really interesting, I agree with Chashio that it's a bit hard to look at but I might experiment with the style, it's got potential To match the deciduous forests, your pine forests should be a lot less detailed, imo. Since your deciduous are similar to the type I tend to draw (and the technique you want to mimic is what I use), I'll post a close-up of a small black/white map I'm working on atm. This is how I like to do pseudo-iso pine forests:


I think the main difference is that I'm not showing any individual trees, just hinting at their shapes, just like you're doing in your leaf forests. That's why these styles match, imo Also, this is of course shown much bigger than print size, so it'll be easier to see.

[Chashio]

Yes, Lingon's version is a good match.

[jshoer]

I concur; you have a great start but maybe you are going TOO detailed. You could probably erase parts of the trees on the inner part of the forest boundary. I liked the tree trunks, but I would make them much shorter.

Another thing you could play with is squiggling the diagonal lines of the trees a little to give them some pine bough flavor.

[DanielHasenbos]

Style wise the pine forest that Lingon showed is much more like the other forest you've drawn. The style you're using now just sort of clashes with the other

[mtcarpentersr]

Okay, thank you all for your input. I completely agree with everything all of you added. Since the original trees were more of an outline, the pine forest should be more of an outline.

Unfortunately, two things occurred when I did this; 1.) I didn't care for the look of it; I just couldn't make it match the other treeline, and 2.) I have tendency when I hit a wall I do nothing with it, and the project dies an abrupt death.

So, after a few weeks of working completely around this on other stuff, I decided to just try and get going on this again and go with a more singular, spread out look. I agree with what DanielHasenbos hit on; the two styles didn't match, so I changed them to be more similar. Let me know what you think:



I did save the other layers and I might revisit them later; I know I didn't really satisfy my answer for how to do it that way, but I have a feeling I won't care for the look of it.

I've got to add a desert and probably some sort of detail in the water. I'm going to revisit my city symbols as well. One of the guys from the game group thought the city at the top of the map looked like a circus, so I think I want to do something different with them.