Hi Adepts, this is the Shadowed Wetland (30x35)! Don't forget, Shadowed is code for Shadowfell- I might be putting these up on Roll20 eventually in a map pack so for the sake of being generic I'll be calling this series Shadowed, which I feel is nicely vague. Anyway, I made these wetlands really yucky for your variant, enjoy!
This week I whipped up kinda a weird one, I think- a forest with lots of elevation with a path leading to a sort of small promontory in a pond. I don't know what the deal is with it, but it feels dramatic! I was toying around with adding some jagged rocks ringing the pond but they felt a little awkward and too obviously evil, I prefer to leave the opportunity for this pond to be occupied by aggressive wildlife rather than evil druids doing a ritual. The spikes felt like they were leading the map to be used for more arcane purposes.
I wasted a lot of time drawing the ledges for this map, I drew them 3 times before I was happy with the result. It seems like sometime between this and last week I lost the ability to draw rock ledges, because this was painfully difficult whereas last week it was maybe the quickest part of the map. Isn't the brain cool sometimes? Anyway, I struggled through that, wasting much of a full day's work, and the rest fell into place fairly quickly. That said, I wish I knew why I suddenly decided I needed to draw all new rocks. What was wrong with all my old ones? I think they didn't feel like they'd match this new environment. Not that there's anything interesting or special about the new ones I drew, but at least they were made for this map specifically. My head really must be messed up this week.
Colors? I started with the jungle palette I was using for a few months there and just sorta inched down the saturation slider until it was just about right. Then I went back into the colors and tweaked everything until I got juuust the right amount colors peaking through. The end result is this, which I think is a decent representation of Shadowfell, but when I bring the saturation slider back up the colors actually look insane. That made making variants a little trickier than it should have been if I had strategized a little more at the start, so I did my best there. The Blighted one that the Adepts are receiving is the most similar to the bast version and is therefore the more grounded and natural-feeling of those I made, the Expert patrons are getting the weirder stuff, haha.