Magic items tend to be staples in most fantasy, and weirdly, they never played that big of a part in stories I’ve written before. There are a few important ones, but no epic quests that involve picking them up along the way, which means Spectrum Blade will be a little different for me. There will actually be a small number of important magical items and legendary artifacts the heroes will encounter, and since they’re interesting to me, I decided to draw them, too.

I didn’t want to throw in magic items just for the sake of having them, though. So instead, as I developed the outline for Spectrum Blade, I highlighted parts where it seemed a magic item would make a good addition, then I worked out a role for each in the overarching story. Once that seemed solid, I wove them into one of the main themes: Color as a representation of magic. I’ll have a separate post about developing a magic system, but you can probably see a couple things starting to come together for the idea now.

At the end of the plan, I double-checked to make sure each item met a few simple requirements:

1. Is it a pointless MacGuffin or will it actually help shape the story?
2. Does its existence help enrich the story world?
3. Will any of these end up being viewed as a Deus ex Machina?
4. Are any of them wildly overpowered?
5. Are they necessary to tell the story I want to tell?

A few passed the test. A few did not. Ultimately, I think there will be six such magical items through the course of the series, but most of them come into play in the first book, and then help shape the rest.

For now, back to the “drawing items” part. My parents gave me a beautiful set of Holbein gouache paints for my birthday and though I’d used them for a doll, this was my first time using them to paint. I’d also never done watercolor painting, so there’s a definite learning curve, but it was lots of fun.

The first item I painted is the Molten Dagger, who gets its name for reasons that should be pretty obvious when you look at it. It’s a pretty useful weapon, and I think it’ll be a fun inclusion in the story. I’m pretty happy with the outline for the first book at this point, so I’m working on fleshing out ideas for the later parts of the series while I put together bits and pieces like this to enrich the first one. Although I’d love to include illustrations in the paperback editions of the books, I feel the images would lose a lot in black and white, so I’ll keep them as something special to see when you visit my website, I suppose. I’ll be putting together an image gallery for Spectrum Blade (Like I have for the Snakesblood Saga) pretty soon.

I’ve filmed the process of painting the two items I’ve done so far, just for fun. Here it is, if you want to take a look:

Next week, I’ll share the other item I created.

The characters for Spectrum Blade were actually one of the first things I came up with. I spent a long time stewing over rough concepts for each of the heroes that would join the party, in addition to rounding out some villains. But while the characters themselves came together pretty easily, the backgrounds for them haven’t.

Instead of trying to put everything together before I start, I decided it may be best to start with general concepts that can grow organically as I write the story. There will need to be some basics, but those are pretty easy to come by.

I knew there would be two lead characters, one male and one female, and then a handful of secondary characters who play very important parts, but won’t always be in the fray. The hero is Zaide, a young elf with snowy hair and one cut ear. And one of the secondary characters is Resia, Zaide’s childhood best friend.

While Zaide is a foster child, raised in the care of the region’s Elder–a common practice among houses that wish to broaden their child’s horizons–Resia is a native of the forest city they call home. If you saw the world map I shared last week, their home city is the marker directly south of Lake Sian. So far, the name I’m planning for the forest region is Kolmar–making Resia one of the Kolmari.

Most of the Kolmari can be compared to wood elves, with darker complexions, brown eyes, and brown or black hair. That makes Zaide and the other foster children oddballs, with each of them bearing the coloration common in their home region.

Since the goal of being fostered is acquiring the practices of the region they’re fostered in, Zaide spends his days training with the Kolmari soldiers. While Resia would be welcome among them, her interests are more scholarly. She spends most of her time studying history and linguistics, and while she tries to pass her knowledge of Amroch’s languages on to Zaide, who knows whether or not he’s really listening.

As I developed these characters, I decided to do artwork for each of them. With their friendship in mind, it made sense to draw Zaide and Resia together, perhaps during one of her lessons.

And just for fun, you can see the coloring process, too.

Gosh, it had been years since I used Prismacolor pencils. I hit my stride later in the video, but those early experiments were rough. I also decided to do something anime-styled for some reason; heaven knows why, I haven’t done that since I was a teen. Oh well. It was fun! I may use gouache for the next character portrait, but we’ll see. I’d like to do illustrations for everyone.

I’ve been fascinated by fantasy world maps since I was a kid. I always told myself that when I eventually published my own fantasy books, I’d make sure they had maps. Preferably ones I drew myself, since I’m a control freak like that.

Having done map making the “right” way before, starting with tectonic plates for my fictional planet and building landmasses appropriately on top of them, planning weather patterns, determining watersheds and river placement based on geography… well, I knew it took a ton of time. My map for Ithilear to go with my Snakesblood Saga books still isn’t done, several years after its beginning. I figured there had to be a faster way.

The method I came up with relied on the map generator created by Amit Patel and available over at RedBlob Games. It’s offered as open source and is incredibly useful as a starting point. The generator creates an island with a central mountain. I knew I wanted the country to be something of a peninsula, jutting out into the ocean so Amroch would have water on three sides and a nebulous “rest of the world” off the right side of the map, so that meant I’d need to do a little work to finish one side of the thing… but that’s easier than drawing something from scratch.

I knew a few specifics I wanted out of the layout, though. I wanted a forested area in the southeast and a desert in the west, and snowy wastes to the north. Obviously, this means Amroch will be quite large, but you do get a little leeway in fantasy worlds, so a harsher climate isn’t too far fetched. I punched in dozens of random seed numbers for maps, stopping when I found one I felt would work.

With the biomes visible, I had a good place for a forested region in the southeast, a desert to the southwest, some harsh, cold terrain to the north, and a couple cool islands as a bonus. The mountains cutting off the northern region from the rest of the world worked well for my story plans, too. I turned off the biome visibility and saved the generated map to draw over and turn into my main map image.

The first portion of map work was pretty boring, just tracing the coastline and expanding the land mass to the edge of the map on the right side, then redrawing the rivers and water bodies, as well as sampling the colors I liked and repainting the land features with textured brushes.

With the way the land mass created a crescent on the right side, I figured all that runoff would result in a massive lake, which worked well for my plans of having that region be a heavily forested agricultural area. I turned part of the coastline into a path for a wide river feeding into the ocean from the giant lake. I decided Amroch would be sheltered by mountains on the east, even if they’re not visible on the map, so I added a jutting mountain range above the lake. I also took the liberty of making the northern region look a little frostier, and added some tributaries to a few of the big rivers.

Then it was time to plan cities.  I tried to be logical about it, and work with what I already had in mind for the different peoples that would inhabit the world. The marshy area near the sea would be a great place for agriculture, probably with a focus on growing things like rice. The islands would be ideal places for a thriving fishing community. There would need to be a few major rest stops along the coasts for resupply of ships, and the kingdom’s heart would need to be set somewhere with an abundant supply of food and fresh water, as well as someplace more easily defensible, meaning the small peninsula on the lake–sheltered by rivers around it–would be the perfect place for the capital. There were two other factions that needed attention, so the isolated northern tribes got a settlement near a body of freshwater in the north, away from everything else, and the defense-minded desert people would have a fortress on the hill in the middle of the desert peninsula, where they could not only hold out against invaders, but would be sheltered by the lack of resources readily available in the desert.

While there would be a great deal more small settlements, I opted to mark only the largest and most important, keeping the map less cluttered. So last of all came trade routes. These would help determine where the rest of the settlements would be when it came time to write, and also let me know where my characters would be traveling. Until we had the idea for highways where we bulldozed the land to make room for our roadways, roads tended to take the path of least resistance. So a few major roads went in alongside rivers and the coasts, where supplies would be abundant and the route would be difficult to lose–just follow the water to the next settlement. A couple harsh mountain passes would be a necessity, but the main travel routes would run a circuit around most of the country. I’m sure there would be smaller routes that would make travel easier and more direct between two points, but again, not worth marking.

My favorite result of adding trade routes was the triangle formed by roadways in the center south. I figure there will be a city at each intersection, and as my super-cool friend Michelle pointed out, it would make a perfect gathering place for seasonal festivals and markets, and I’m totally going to incorporate that idea into the book once I actually start writing.

At that point, it was time to start labeling the darn thing. I named the lake and the sea, and marked an important region of land, but I don’t have any ideas for city names just yet. But considering I only spent two weeks working on the map when I had a few minutes left at the end of some days, I think it’s working out pretty well. I guess the next step will be naming places, but that will probably tie in to creating all the characters and their cultures.

There are a few other things to do, like creating a black-and-white version of the map that will look all right in print, but for the most part, the map for the front pages of Spectrum Blade is ready.