Village of Oakside

[aeshnidae]

The village of Oakside, pledged to Brynehall's House Legion, started as a small seasonal logging camp. Located on the far western edge of the barony (and realm), Oakside is now inhabited by about 600 people year-round but the population can swell to over 1,000 souls during the winter logging season. Many of the permanent residents are devoted to their Blessed Tree and have created an offshoot religion (some would say cult) dedicated to it. The Last Tavern is truly the last tavern in the western part realm. To the west is nothing but thick forest for a hundred miles or more.

I got started on the first sketch by hand but then realized I might as well draw it in Photoshop with my Wacom tablet. Here's the part I sketched on paper:


I went through a couple of earlier versions and wound up making some of my own brushes from my other maps; I like the idea of having the map be 98% my hand drawing. I especially wanted to use my own trees and make Oakside feel like it's surrounded by dense, deep, towering forest.

My current version is not quite final but getting there. I need to decide whether I want to address scale, among other things.

[aeshnidae]

Now with temple!

Attachment 101970

[BLeoanrd]

I really like the colors here - the lines are clean, and the village is easy to picture. The choice to do Bird's Eye is a good one, as you get a sense of the entire space. I really dig it.

[aeshnidae]

Thanks, BLeoanrd! I find the bird's eye view to be the best for in-game use with my particular D&D group. I just realized I need to add another gate from the lumber yard area to the farms...always good to take a look at the map with fresh eyes after working on it for too long.

[aeshnidae]

Finally got around to adding the gate to the lumber yard.

[Caenwyr]

whew aeshnidae, this is looking awesome! If I might give one point of critique, I'd say there's quite a range of line thicknesses, where ideally all lines should be equally thick (well at least for one type of object). I wouldn't have noticed your small trees were essentially downsized versions of your big ones, if the thick lines around the big ones hadn't given it away. I'm not sure if this can be easily fixed in your workflow (if you work with vector graphics, you can just select all the layers and give them the same thickness in one fell swoop), but if it is, I'd certainly advise to do so!

But even if that's impossible, don't worry too much about it. This is a great map, and you can definitely be proud of it!

[aeshnidae]

Thanks, Caenwyr! You are definitely right about the line thickness. I made two brushes from my hand-drawn trees (one brush is a single tree, the other is a small cluster of trees). The line thickness increases or decreases based on the size of the brush. Unfortunately I'm not sure how to remedy that in Photoshop.

Based on your feedback, I may just erase the large trees outside of the town and replace them with trees in a smaller brush size. The line thickness would be still inconsistent, but it would not be as noticeable.