This Week's Maps #3: Cities and Lost Leyawiin

The urban maps I've been drawing, and a city that never was.

My work

Hello again! Recently I’ve been knee-deep in urban maps, and I have a couple of snippets to show you.

I’ve tried out 3D illustration before, but not nearly as often as I probably should have -and this was one of the only 3D maps I’ve drawn, and the first for a long while. I’m very pleased with how it’s turned out! Though it ended up containing a lot more work than a usual map - it had close to double the amount of brush strokes in an average map (closer to 20,000 than 10,000). But it was definitely worth it, and I love getting the opportunity to really flesh out an individual building and give it some character.

Here’s another city map I worked on, something closer to my normal style. It was fun getting to play around with a steampunk setting, which I don’t get to do nearly as frequently as I’d like.

There have been others too, but these were the highlights for me!

(If you want to commission a map, you can find my page for that here.)

Now, on with the rest.

Other Maps

Since urban maps have been on my mind this week, it seems only natural that this week’s featured map is a city - Leyawiin from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

Below you’ll see the in-game map for Leyawiin (handily annotated by the folks at UESP, link here). It’s… perfectly fine, if a little blocky.

In game, I always found Leyawiin very difficult to navigate and from browsing forums over the years, it seems I’m not alone. Cities like Anvil, Chorrol and Skingrad have distinctive shapes that make them easier to follow, with central streets and landmarks. Leyawiin is just a grid.

Despite this, Leyawiin remained one of my favourite places in Oblivion. The architecture was so different to the rest of the province, and it was so damp. It rained all the time, felt generally gloomy, and was surrounded by thick, dark forests teeming with creepy ruins. It felt like a dingy, forgotten place on the edge of the province - which was of course the idea. The aesthetic was chef’s kiss, as they say.

But people, we were robbed.

Concept art for the Oblivion cities has appeared online in the two decades since the game released and, for the most part, the cities mentioned above (Skingrad, Anvil etc) look like their initial concepts. Leyawiin’s art, though, makes me sad for what we could have had.

Look at it! Look. At. It.

I just love this illustration. I have done since I first saw it years and years ago.

I recall reading somewhere that they had to reduce the scope for the game’s cities because of the restrictions of computer and console power. You can see how Leyawiin was truncated when comparing the two maps side-by-side: the actual map we got seems to have lost the section of city on the eastern bank entirely, and a smaller castle is all that remains of the awesome, looming island-fortress initially planned.

While I accept and understand the reasons for the change, I’m still going to feel sad for the Leyawiin that never was, and stare at that beautiful concept piece a little longer.