Garden Temple, Adept & Expert (Patreon)

Hello my lovely patrons, your alternate map this week is another double- a partially lit version of the regular night map and another 'subdued' palette version! I've been thinking, and I think I'll probably be making a subdued version nearly every week as a bonus version (when it applies), mostly because I've found a quick way to do it but also because I like how it changes the feel of the map- especially since so many of my maps come across as super cheerful due to my typical palette. 

1. With the prompt being 'garden temple', I wasn't too sure what I was going to do. As someone who's been playing Magic: the Gathering for several years I had Selesnya temples/guildgates in mind, but I wasn't too sure how well all those archways and spires would translate to 2D maps. Next I looked into a Roman courtyard-styled temple, with the middle cut out for an open air garden. I liked it, but I felt that the garden was being limited by the space, and the layout wasn't very interesting for me to design. Finally I settled on a Japanese styled walled garden as the entrance, though much more rough. I like the idea of a slice of the forest walled off for a temple, and I felt it would make for interesting story if nothing else. 

2. For the most part the outlines came about pretty typically this week. I decided to try drawing a body of water without a shore (the pond), instead having the grass directly ring the water. I don't think I quite like it, but it certainly doesn't look as unusual as I thought it would originally. I also tried out a different type of stone tile for the temple interior, going with the plain 5'x5' squre stone slabs but with small amounts of decorative lines on certain tiles, which I think helps draw the eye away from how minimal the amount of detail is on the floor in general. 

3. Coloring this kind of half and half map is always difficult, and even the easier ones take twice as long to shade since there are twice as many environments. I decided to do the outside quick and dirty, using tried and true colors and techniques that I've used on dozens of maps. The inside I found tricky, as for whatever reason I couldn't detail the shadows enough to satisfy me. I settled eventually, but I'm not to sure what the issue was.