# Mapmaking Discussion & Philosophy (WIP/Critique) > Pen and Paper / Traditional Methods >  Heron Bay Project

## wminish

Hi Everyone

You may have noticed that I've been quite quiet on this forum for the past few months. I've been steadily working away on a large project which is now finished so I thought I would share it with you all. I've been putting together what is really my first serious commercial project, a map pack featuring a large top-down city which I've called Heron Bay. The pack is now up for sale and can be found at the link below (this links to my site which connects to the listing on DriveThruRPG).

Heron Bay Map Pack

This is BY FAR the largest mapping project I've ever done, the city is spread across three A3 sheets in full colour. Looking back through the photos I've taken of the project for Instagram I've been working on it since mid July or maybe even a bit earlier. Below I've shown the first photos I took of the project during the pencilling in stage.
  

The inking in stage was the most time-consuming part of this project taking me about 6 weeks to complete.
    

Each of the 3 maps loosely show one expansion phase of the city with map one showing the newest part of the city and map 3 showing the oldest part.
  

The maps are coloured with watercolour paints which have now become my goto colouring method for maps.
   

And finally, here is the completed map two of the pack. I'm currently only showing the finished image of this map online, the other two maps are only available in the pack itself.


So there we go, I hope you've enjoyed having a look at this project, I really enjoyed working on it. Let me know what you think anyway. Thanks Everyone.

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## Arimel

Holy cow that is amazing! The level of detail... What type of watercolors did you use for this? The colors are really clean. 

Also, as a side note, I like your new profile (the image alongside your posts, that is the profile right?) picture!

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## Naima

Vewry nice!

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## KaiAeon

This is great!

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## Adfor

Wow Will, you are seriously stepping up your mapping game, this is incredible!  I love how you put the foliage all along the outside of the buildings, it gives it such a natural flow.

IR

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## Marcolino

amazing city map.

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## wminish

> Holy cow that is amazing! The level of detail... What type of watercolors did you use for this? The colors are really clean. 
> 
> Also, as a side note, I like your new profile (the image alongside your posts, that is the profile right?) picture!


Thanks Arimel. In terms of the watercolours I used the pebeo studio watercolour paints which I usually use for my maps. I was very careful when laying down the base colours to get consistent colouring, particularly on the roofs. For the base colours I would mix up a decent amount of the colour in a small bowl and dilute it with water to get a consistent dilution across the three maps. When laying down the colour I would use a large brush and try to fill complete areas in one go to avoid lines from laying wet colour over dry colour. Pictured below is most of the selection of colours that I used.


I'm glad you like the new profile picture as well, I've been meaning to make my profile pictures consistent across platforms for a while so made the new one last week. My old one was an image that I've been using as my gaming profile pic for years and wasn't drawn by me.




> Wow Will, you are seriously stepping up your mapping game, this is incredible!  I love how you put the foliage all along the outside of the buildings, it gives it such a natural flow.
> 
> IR


Thanks Ian, it was a hard project but I'm glad I stuck with it as the result has been great.




> Vewry nice!





> This is great!





> amazing city map.


Thanks guys, I appreciate the complements.

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## DocKaos

These are absolutely stunning, would totally hang them on my wall  :Surprised:

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## Tirsor

The maps look gorgeous. I like the whole series of photos from the cross-section of the work. I'm just starting with the colors. For starters, I use colored ink. It's hard, but I believe I can do it one day. Nice work.

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