A Haunted Village

[BLeoanrd]

Hello! So I'm a little nervous about this, but this is one of my main reasons for joining. I've been crafting a world to set some of my stories in, and I sort of fixated on a New England village in the Lovecraft/Stephen King style. You know, one of those places that you think wouldn't have everything, from the strange lab to the big haunted house on the hill to the university to the hotel...but it does. The name is still TBD, but I've been using Photoshop and some of the tutorials around here to craft the landscape.

Here's what I started with:



(If I can get it at some point I'll show the underlying sketch.)

And this is what that became:



At this point, I really started to struggle with textures and Alpha Channels, but I was able to add color:



That's where I am at the moment. I'm currently working on adding more texture to the land - the mountains, the forests, etc. Next, I want to overlay roads and locations. Each of those locations will then get their own micromap, from the downtown to the island to the art museum to the abandoned fort. There are 13 locations in all, one for each sign of the zodiac and one for the center of the wheel.

[Nod_Hero]

Keep at it, looks like you're doing okay!

[BLeoanrd]

Keep at it, looks like you're doing okay!

Thanks! I appreciate it. This project got put on the back burner because of class and exams, but I'm hoping to get back to it soon.

[ZoraSpringer]

When I got into villages, there was one tutorial on youtube that helped me a lot figuring out a nice style for all of that. Though I really recommend figuring out the road-maps and form blocks of houses before you start drawing in little blocks of houses. So I will give you the link to the "tutorial" (actually it's rather a speed painting video) I use for my city maps. It was done traditionally there, but I'm pretty sure it can be done digitally just as well

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHEsAk_cstY&t=4s

Actually now that I think about it, I think I might do a step by step tutorial on how I do city maps the next time I do one (I don't have process pictures of the maps before that, sooo...)

[BLeoanrd]

I know this is an old post, but I was inspired to go back to this map. Instead of messing around with alpha channels, I decided to focus on layers. It's a bit more time intensive, but I feel more comfortable using the shading of various layers using expand/contract. Each of the different layers is a different depth - the darker it is, obviously, the deeper it is. Here's where I was this morning - I've since added some more rivers and lakes.