After a long hiatus I made a quick battlemap to get the juices flowing again.

I used transparency and drop shadows to make very quick shadows of the trees, although I'm not quite happy with the intersection of the drop shadow and the wall shadow of the treestumps.

The stranded ship is just a room with a wooden wall. This works quite ok, but I think there is some decoration missing to make it scream "ship"

Trying a thicker grid this time with a strong transparency effect, not sure if I like it yet. On screen it looks good, but let's see what my printer says tomorrow ^^

from my point of view, setting up a template months ago definitely paid off, the layout of the map was quickly done, the small sandbanks where just cut out with the color key effect. but my greates weakness, placing props to make the map interesting, got even worse with my long pause. I always think my maps either look bland, like here, or totally overcrowded...

Ok, I think I call it finished. More talented folks like you could make the map more awesome still, but I've other things to prepare for our session on the weekend, so I call it here.

The map is designed to be a hideout in a cave that once belonged to a dwarven clan. On the bottom left there is a Teleport portal connecting this cave to other ones. The thieves arranged their loot in a way so they can shot at intruders entering from the right, that's why there is nearly no cover there. But our heroes found the other cave first and will now be entering through the Portal, giving them the advantage this setup, if they manage to overpower the Rogues sleeping in their cods, that is...

For fun I thought I'd show the way the river flows not with water effects but with logic: if there are steps down to the water, presumably to get drinking water and for cleaning purposes, and there is a toilet room directly over the river, it should be clear in which direction the river flows ;)

This was exactly what I was looking for!

I played around a little with the settings. It's not perfect yet, but good enough for tonight:

For some reason there's an extra line at the top of the steps and the last step is too bright, even though I changed the texture of the background halfway down the stairs so it matches the texture on the lower level.

But this are stories for another day

:)

This is a reimagining of a battlemap I made a long time ago, but now done in Mike Schley stile:

I'm not quite happy yet with the shadows. I think I made the tree shadows too long. I'll play around with that a bit more.

Especially the shadows of the treetops: I placed them manually on a separate shadow layer. They seem to vanish completely, I probably made them too weak. Also the positioning is just guesswork. A drop shadow that's bigger than the object it is casting it (as if the tree stump was close to the light source) would be perfect to automatically generate treetop shadows, but I didn't find such an option.

The bevel effect on the high ground however looks really nice and I think it gives a good impression of depth. I'm quite pleased with that.

The little waterfall is a good start but I think it's missing something that gives it more live. I tried to add white lines with an edge fade and a dropshadow to simulate areas with lots of air bubbles and the shadows those would be casting, but that did not look good at all.

here is a closeup of the waterfall:

Does anyone has any ideas on how to improve on that? I think @Loopysue made some amazing water ripple effects once, but I don't remember the map annual she did it for :/