 Hello, I'm Kyle, and this video is brought to you by the Old Road Zeme. Today we're going to be using cross-hatching and negative drawing to render the pathways of the Yawning Ether. But before we get out the micron and get into all that technical drawing, it's time to make a plan. This was the hardest map that I've drawn so far. I knew when I set out to do this that in order to keep from repeating myself, I was going to have to get weird. I was going to have to dig deep and find new ideas, and this is it. This is that. And it's really exciting to show you this piece. As always, I make a big list of ideas on the side of the page, just some word associations, some imagery, some things to draw. So if I'm feeling stuck, I have somewhere to go. I already have done some thinking on this. For this piece, The Mount of Stars, I wanted to do a mountain so tall that it touched space that this is where you can launch into your interplanetary, interdimensional journeys, and that the veil between worlds is thinnest here. We're talking crashed spaceships. We're talking a portal to a carcosa. We're talking ancient observatories. We're talking constellations that are brushing the top of the mountain. This was just my gift to myself to just say yes to all my kooky sci-fi fantasy ideas, and it was a blast. With the rough pencils out of the way and the space basically planned, it was time to get into the blue pencils and really get into the specific layout and make sure that everything fit. Now I never pencil in a lot of detail because I want to leave room for discovery, for surprise. And this was one of the big surprises that came about in the blue pencil stage, this mountain full of these giant empty cicada husks. When I started drawing this, I knew this was a special piece. The right side of the page wasn't turning out properly, so I put some graphite on the back of the page and then traced the lines on the front of the page onto the blue pencil page, and it transferred over the drawing so I could finish the blue pencils. So now that we're on to the inking phase, let's talk about crosshatching. Now these are just my opinions, but a lot of people crosshatch with right angles, and it ends up looking like a textile or a fence or a grate, and if it looks like a checker board, it's just not going to do it for me. Instead I like to put down my first row of hatches and then crosshatch at a 10 to 15 degree angle off of that. It's easier to build in contour, it fills in more space, it adds more value contrast and it's easier to control that way. Say we're shading a sphere. That sphere is not going to look very round if you hatch everything with right angles. So if you hatch things at angles that you can control, at angles that you can change at intervals, it's going to make that contour while you are doing the value contrast as well. There's another technique that I used a lot on this piece, which was negative drawing, which is essentially just leaving space for a glow or a light source to exist when all you have is a black pen. The window on the left is regular drawing and the window on the right is an example of negative drawing because I left space for the window panes. The window is defined by that white area that I left and not by the lines that I drew for the actual window panes. One of the things I'm particularly excited about this piece is I managed to crosshatch an aurora borealis by using negative drawing. So I left room for the lights of the aurora borealis and crosshatched all around it and it gave it this fuzzy luminescent look that I'm just really pleased with. Now when tackling a space drawing, space is two things that a micron is not. Space is vast and space is dark. A micron is not going to be able to fill up a page, but by crosshatching closer and closer in extra layers, just 10 degrees off from one another, you can get things really dark. If you still need deeper values, you can use Kirby dots. My favorite cartoonist, Jack Kirby, innovated this way of filling up space with these dots, but it's actually the negative space in between those dots that really gives it that vibrancy, that crackle that people talk about. Now this piece was enormously satisfying to ink and it was going really, really well and I kept wanting more out of it, so I just kept adding challenges to myself. I wanted to crosshatch space. I wanted to crosshatch the aurora borealis. I wanted to shade in these delicate petrograms on the wall. I wanted to show a twisted reflection in the lake of the horrible city of Carcosa. I wanted to draw a rusty, crashed spaceship, just so many different surfaces, so many intricate little details. I gotta say, I feel really good about it. I feel like I hit the exact mood that I wanted to. I hit this surreal atmosphere that I wanted to and I didn't back down from a challenge. I didn't just do safe things. I did things that made me uncomfortable and made me think I might have just ruined this piece. It would have to start all over again. But that's how you get better. That's how you grow is by going further. Always trying to do something that's just a little bit harder than anything you've ever tried before. That's it for this map. Thanks again to my Kickstarter backers. If you missed the backing period on Kickstarter, you can pre-order the PDF on my itch page down below. If you have any questions for me about drawing or mapping or anything like that, just drop them in the comments. I have to draw a lot of these maps to finish this project. So chances are I'll have a good opportunity to demonstrate something you have a question about. If you heard something nifty, go ahead and leave me a like. If you want to see more of these videos, go ahead and subscribe. And maybe one day I'll see you on the old roads.