THE ISLAND
The Island Of Caorainn is based on some of the islands I spent time on during my childhood. I’ve also included some locations from around mainland Scotland, then added places based on some of my favourite buildings and landscapes in Greece, Canada, Switzerland and Japan! Some of them were drawn from photo reference, others are straight from my hazy memory. I also spent some time designing a house, a cafe and a forest area that are pretty similar to what I would design if I was ever given the chance to do so in the real world. The fun thing about building a world is it can be whatever you want it to be, the only limit is your imagination.
Some of the locations, such as the lighthouse, the resort hotel and the lake, were developed naturally from the storylines I have already plotted. Other landmarks, such as the campsite, the weird rocks and the smaller islands, were added with no current storyline in mind, but they may suggest things in the future. I left empty areas in both the North and South for anything I may have left out and wish to add later. As the story takes place over a number of years I have also sketched out certain areas of the island at different stages in their development. The stories I am writing explore the universal experience of life in an isolated location, so the more varied the individual physical landscapes are, the more angles I will have to approach that exploration.
Colour and shape are also important in world building. I want to have different environments that suggest different colour palettes, stylistic choices and approaches to line-work. After the comic has been running for a few years, I hope the keen reader will be able to spot different locations just from a glance at the colours and shapes in any given sequence. I will write more about colour palettes in a future post.
This post originally appeared on the From Sand To Sky blog.
