The Heart is a Jungle

April 26, 2015

Dear friends. How long has it been since I’ve written? Things have changed. I’ve been so busy.

But I still heart jungles.

I spent a few weeks in the Philippines recently. Then I came home and re-discoverd the maps I drew for my jungle books. Presto! A new post.

I just wanna look in there…

Here is the first version of the Fire in the Jungle map. My initial idea combined regular jungle, dark jungle, and apocalypse jungle into a single map…

Later, I decided to move the dark jungle and apocalypse jungle ideas mostly out of the initial campaign area, to develop them separately with different styles and themes. Here’s a later version of the original Fire in the Jungle map in pencil…

Mostly similar to the final map. Looking back, I like the shaded mountains in the that version better, compared to the icon style mountains in the published map…

A short jungle interlude. That’s me in the green shirt, participating in a wet t-shirt contest, in a river, under the jungle. The woman in pink dominated…

There were numerous steps in creating the Tomb of the Monkey God map. First, I worked it all out in pencil, with lots of erasing along the way (right map). Then I traced it in ink with the help of a stencil. Finally, it was scanned, tweaked, and colored digitally to produce the final map…

Roadtripping in northeast Mindanao, Philippines…

The map in Jungle Castle Rock Apocalypse is based on northeast Mindanao, then flipped horizontally. I’m so clever. I sketched out a pile of topographic maps. An early version…

A couple versions later I experimented with a broader floodplain and steeper mountains…

Until finally settling on a more balanced version…

Another picture from the road. This mountain valley area is probably the closest I’ve ever been to actual wild and crazy jungle-jungle. This is actually the primary “highway” along the eastern Surigao coast…

I visited Corregidor Island! A primary inspiration for Jungle Castle Rock Apocalypse. The book’s cover photo is the entrance to Malinta Tunnel in 1945…