Southport_Personal chalange_first attempt at a stacked/layerd/vertical settlement

[Misjay Maps]

This is a 2-in-1 map challenge for me
1 - make a new map based on a 10 year old sketch (probably the 1st fantasy map I every attempted)
2 - add an area of vertical /deep/layers city

I keep finding myself gazing at illustrations of fantasy cities that are mostly vertical .... piled up cliffs, or around tall centeral biuildings, up a steep hill, built onto the side of some ancient giant stricture.. you know the ones...
and then I find myself wondering how the heck to draw that on a top-down map...
So this is my 1st attempt.

this is where it started - the original sketch:


For this one I decided to start in Procreate on the iPad because I have been playing around with a method of painting/drawing cliffs in layers of colour first, using a lumpy brush I made, then use that as a 'trace' for the ink...
I tend to 'ink' and colour in tandem sometimes one first, sometimes the other first.

you can see the cliff colour layers here - the Bottom Left corner has not been 'inked' yet. (and the water has not been totally coloured in around the rocks yet).
the red dots are possible future locations of watch towers - have decided on a lot of watch towers without the wall inbetween - but lots of rocky ground instead.



you can see that already it is changing from the original sketch - I swear that maps have a mind of their own sometimes and I am just the instrument of their emergence...