When I decided to launch this website, I hoped to share my concept artwork and some of my thoughts behind the world that I have created, alongside having an encyclopaedia of the world of Gear. As I prepared artwork to add to the website I found among my early sketches, some very different ideas compared to my final thoughts. After putting them in chronological order, I was surprised to see how much things had changed from my initial concepts to my finished design. Through my artwork I was able to see how my world had taken shape. And so, in this first post I thought I would share the very first map I drew as a young teenager in a little red sketch book.

This is the little red sketch book that my earliest ideas were put down in.

In the beginning I had the idea of setting my story in a world of islands, with my heroine having adventures alongside a crew of pirates, a prince and a librarian. I never wrote down any of these ideas as they tended to be very vague. There were going to be seven kingdoms/territories, I remember now that each region was very different, with each having a different climate or very different kinds of people. There would be islands inhabited entirely by the beast people, and another by ninjas. Although the first photo of the map doesn’t show it very well, there was a central circular ocean, which as an idea carried on through my development. In the second image of the map you can see how I should have drawn it.

Each one of the seven areas of the map would be easily identifiable by a dominant colour, dark blue, purple, yellow, blue, red, green and black.  Unsurprisingly, the ninjas were going to come from the black region. The little I remember about the original plot with a different heroine from the one I eventually wrote, was that she set out to collect seven mystical gemstones, one from each region.

Against the wishes of her own rulers, Kasume my original heroine joined up with a pirate crew and picked up other friends along the way. Her goal was to unite all seven gems in a pendant that would grant the wearer the power to bring peace to the world, so long as the heart of the wearer was pure. In this simple story and this crude map, it is possible to see the beginnings of something much bigger and infinitely more complicated.