Style Change (Patreon)

I've been mulling over the idea of reworking my map's styles. I've never been really satisfied with it as it is and I'm not even sure my current style fulfills the goals I laid out in my description.

This problem, I think, is pretty evident in the Temple Archives map from last week. I wasn't satisfied with the map by the end of it, in particular the line-art and coloring. In particular:

• The colors in the base map tended to blend together due to the similar tones and lack of lighting.
• The square grid ruined the relatively smooth detailing that the floor was supposed to have and blended with the lines whose purpose was to separate the differently colored regions.
• My current style guide demands that differently-colored regions be separated by a firm black line, which inflates the wall line thickness by preventing detailing lines from being particularly thin.
• Because detailing lines can't be thin, they end up looking too heavy for their purpose.
• The above two issues culminated in making a map whose grid rendered the line-art nearly unreadable without color. The line-art for the Temple Archives was really bad. This directly defies my goals and it does so not by being excessively detailed but by just being mediocre. I can do better than that.
• Because colored regions can only have one color, with only marginal shading, there's no way to reasonably create reflective or multi-colored surfaces.

I'm pleased that it was nice enough to secure another patron, of course, but it still didn't feel quite good enough.

Instead of drawing the next map's sketches today like I had actually planned on doing, I spent a few hours creating new brushes and trying them out. I finally created a scratchy sketch-like brush that I really liked, and started toying with it, and that's what the image attached is. I also tried out something completely different: shading. This turned out looking pretty nice, but causes me another issue in that tokens no longer fit in with a map very well out-of-the-box. The end user (you!) would have to manually adjust the token's shading to fit.

For comparison, I also copied the linework over into a new room to see what it looks like without shading. I don't know if I can get it to look as nice as the way I've been drawing my maps without it, but I'm also not really confident that the way I've been drawing is nice to begin with. I'm also concerned that this style looks too similar to other artists, which my gut says is a ridiculous complaint.

I'm still trying to use material textures lightly if at all. I intend on keeping the crosshatching texture for all normal materials, and I still love the way the halftone looks. I'm going to keep toying with the idea as I draw the next map, which will be drawn at least mostly in this style instead of the old one, just to test the waters.

So, what I'm trying to figure out right now is whether or not the shading is worth sacrificing the ease with which Dutchman tokens can be merged with the map. Or, phrased differently, does the non-shaded room look good enough, considering that adding the advanced shading would impact the usability of the tokens? (changing styles would also cause backwards compatability issues with pre-existing tokens, but the longer I wait to do this, the worse it gets)

Finally, on the topic of the next map, I've had some difficulty coming up with a functional, useful variant I could base off of it. There just isn't a lot of interesting options for something like a dojo, so instead, I'm going to draw an entirely separate small spaceship floor plan, around ~10x15 or so.

I'll probably ask some of these questions over on Reddit, too, since it's such a small audience here at the moment. At least, I will once I figure out what subreddit to post it on. I'll post a preview of the next map in a couple of days, once I've got something down for it. Tell me what you think, in the meantime.