Everyone loves a good map for their RPG session. Well some love to play purely theater of mind (i would like to meet them) but my group does like a good bit of combat on a grid. So for the most part i have been making very, very basic maps in roll20 with the in game drawing tools. One of my main goals of doing this was to save my quota space. They are fine if a little finicky. With some of the premium assets i am sure you could make many very good looking maps. Here are my maps at the moment.
However, i really like hand drawn art styles. So i have decided to get back into drawing some hand drawn maps. The first map was a super quick mock up which i decided to use as an actual battle map for the players. The second map was an attempt to get a bit more definition and a 3D look to the drawing. I am really happy with both (the 1st took no time, the second looks pretty good) except for the furniture and such in the second map. I am still a baby in the drawing world so that skill will just have to come along as i draw more. Practice makes perfect no?
So after i decided i would actually use these maps as battle maps in roll20 the issue of black and white vs colour came up in my mind. Black and white could be very cool. It would be as if we were around the table drawing on a sketch book just like old times. I even thought of keeping the blue lines and the scanned binder rings intact to really give it that feeling of an at home game. In the end though i decided to try my hand at a bit of computer colouring. Here are the results.
The first one looks pretty good i think. Both are mainly 50% opacity layers on top of each other with a plain colour. I tried to get some shadows happening with another layer and a bluer variant of the colour underneath. I think they look okay for my novice purposes. I really love the detailed map with the colours loosely smudging off the page into white. I think the players will like this as well as it is like a live painting effect. They will be playing in an environment which is being coloured in real time so to speak. The large map was not originally going to be all colour but again i really quickly coloured it up and for the amount of time invested it looks good. The time for the detailed close up map was hours, probably over four. The time for the compound map was maybe an hour, if that. The main reason for the amount of time taken was that i could not bucket fill any sections. The scan of my pencil drawing didn’t have definitive, solid lines for the bucket fill to completely paint over the white space. Moreover, i could not make a layer of the lines to fill the space nicely due to this style.
Would i do it again? Probably not for the detailed map unless i figure out a way to be more efficient. The amount of time it took was excessive. The less detailed map will absolutely be something i start doing more of. With some of the brushes i have acquired from Deviant Art (mountains, trees and the like) i can add detail quite easily to these pictures to have a nice colourful, cartoon effect to my maps. Overall i really enjoyed the experience and it makes me want to purchase a Wacom tablet so much now.
RPG Downtime 