Cliffs

I mentioned with regards to my draft map that I wasn't super happy with the Rudmont Escarpment, a very large, long, steep cliff. Although in this world of YouTube tutorials, you'd think that would be my first place to turn to look for alternative (and actually it was; although I wasn't completely happy with what I found there either.) I was forced to turn to the tried and true method that I've done ever since I was a kid when I needed a style to draw a map feature on my map that I hadn't done before and didn't have in my style reservoir: look at a bunch of other fantasy maps, find something I liked, and copy it. In the process of copying it, I'd do multiple practice runs of it, and it would of course evolve and change and get my own touch to the point that sometimes it didn't look exactly like what I'd originally tried to copy, although usually in gross, superficial similarity, you could tell that they were brothers.

Of course, in this case, the problem I have is that the feature I'm looking for isn't nearly as common as say, a mountain, a forest, a coastline, a lake, etc. I knew it was going to be difficult to find samples. I did find one poking around on the Cartographer's Guild, and I cut and pasted just the section that shows his cliff technique. And I knew that the Pathfinder Golarion setting had that feature too, so I looked up what I could find for regional maps of that area. I found three different versions (and that may not be all of them; just the ones that I knew of off-hand.) I also cut and pasted just a small area that showed the feature I'm looking to copy. So, I've got four samples, from four different maps, drawn in four similar although not identical styles to look at for inspiration. I actually found a couple of other examples, but they weren't done in a style that was going to be useful to me, or I simply didn't like the look of them, so I didn't grap snapshots of those.

First the Golarion ones.

In some ways the top one is my favorite, and I like the crisp lines and the suggestion of rubble or talus at the base of the cliff. The third one looks like a better fit for my style, however. Again, in imitating these, I'll probably end up hybridizing all kinds of stuff from all of these.

Here's the one I got from the cartographer's guild:

The style of this map overall is much more similar to my style of drawing. However, in my own trials, I'm having a bit of a harder time getting the bottom lines of the cliff to look good.

It occured to me early on—at a glance, really—that all four of these styles are not really black and white styles. They are color styles, and they depend on the colorization and shading that that provides, to create the illusion of depth. It's a totally different kettle of fish trying to do that in a more suggestive black and white way of doing maps. I can imitate the linework all I want, but without the lighter highlight at the lip of the canyon and the darker shadows just below the lip, it won't have the same effect. The only one of the four samples that didn't use this technique was the first one, but even that uses the two different hues; the darker canyon wall vs the flat ground on the top and bottom of the canyon to create a simpler yet still effective shading. I can't do any of that in pure black and white, so I need to imitate it with some kind of hatching, and better yet, draw the cliff in such a way that I don't need nearly as much of it to get the same effect.

Now, I do want some hatching and shading, of course. My mountains, my hills, and my forests all use plenty of that to create the effective of depth and 3-Dishness. But I need to find a hatching/shading technique that is relatively simple to do, simple to repeat so I don't have to worry if it's going to turn out good, and which matches the rest of the shading and hatching that I'm already doing on other elements of my map. I think, honestly, that I'm not quite there yet. Using my phone to take some quick-n-dirty snapshots of my scratch paper that I've been experimenting on—first a few of my cliffs. I think the first one (the most recent one I did) shows the most promise so far.

The one above has some promise, but it's a bit too busy looking. If I'm going to add that much hatching, I need to figure out exactly what to do with the lip especially, as I'm not thrilled with how it looks at all.

Here's some layered cliffs, with a bench of sorts separating them. It looks pretty good.

Here's some of my experiements, most of which I'm maybe not quite as happy with as the ones above. You could call them some "failed drafts." Although the one on the right isn't bad.

The lines with hatching above are one of the ones that I'd tried that I absolutely didn't like. I also have a much tighter gorge or slot canyon. There's also a nice version of the mountain style that I'll likely use right in the middle, for comparison.

UPDATE: I did find another example on the cartographer's guild. While curiously the entir emap is drawn in a black and white ink style that I could use, the cliffs seem to be one of the very few exceptions, that seem to have a grayscale brush pen type look (although I have no doubt that it's done digitally.) I'm not sure that I can make anything out of this or not, but I'll do a few trials on some scratch paper and see what we get.