A Monastery by the Sea
Will Mason
🖼️ 96 images Traveler
I love doing maps that show levels in elevation, though it's challenging. I could have made the elevation levels blend together using shadows and edge fades, but not on this one. I like the feeling of hard shelves sometimes. I feel like an elaborate monastery like this one could be used anywhere, with symbols changed out to fit the new occupants. This particular monastery is dedicated to an insect deity (those are bee hives in the gardens). Any thoughts or suggestions are most welcome.
Comments
The elevation changes are really great!
What a great map! I love the hard elevation changes in this one.
It does look like the land is floating above (rather than sitting in) the water to me. But that may just be me…
It's not just you. It's the shadows.
Yeah, maybe the way the glow on the coast is between the land and the shadows? It looks like surf, but the shadows should fall over it as well. May not be possible to have both, and not have the floaty effect.
Its posable, look at the island. the shadow is on top of the surf. Yhe bridge shadow is above the surf as well. A sheet order problem?
Often, shadowing problems like this can be improved by softening the appearance of the shadows, to make them more subtle (increased transparency, reduced size, altered colouring, adjusted blurring are all possibilities).
The bridge shadow's showing an odd gap, and its presence illustrates that a shadow effect stacked on another one starts to look odd - the bridge is further from the sea than the cliff bases, yet its shadow is more distinct, for instance.
One option to escape that double-shadowing trap might be to use the existing shadow effect lines and areas to redraw the shadow as a separate polygon, and then turn off the shadow effects entirely. Using one of the "Solid" bitmap fills might work for this, or just a normal darker grey polygon with a suitable transparency effect.
There's also the possibility of adding some extra shadow effects to the little rocks in the sea, as they currently don't have any shadows, which makes them look a little odd where they're exposed to the light. If they're all only low-lying rocks though, they'd cast negligible shadows from this viewpoint anyway, so that may be a shadow effect too far 😉.