#pirate map

Source details and larger version.

jake and the neverland pirates

A while back, I thought I’d take a stab at children’s book illustration.

Apart from a few books and greeting cards – I wasn’t doing much in that arena and decided to pull back to focus on graphic design.

Now that I’m settling back into illustration, I thought it would be fun to revisit some of these concepts with a fresh coat of paint in my new style.

Hidden Treasure stimboard!

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This is a map I made in the program Wonderdraft that shows my personal take on the archetypal "Skull Island" as seen in various pirate- and adventure-themed media.

Unlike some other variations of the trope, my version is located deep within the equatorial Atlantic Ocean and owes its flora and fauna to migrations over the course of at least 150 million years. The island's most iconic megafauna are the dinosaurs and other descendants of Mesozoic migrants. However, later arrivals have managed to eke out their own niches beneath the giant saurians, including monkeys related to New World platyrrhines, gorillas and chimpanzees, elephants of African forest affinity, pantherine cats of mixed leopard and jaguar heritage, and even phorusrhacid "terror birds".

The island's human inhabitants would have arrived from the West African coast sometime before 2000 BC, bringing with them established traditions of agriculture and ferrous metallurgy that allowed them to colonize the treacherous landscape and carve it into numerous chiefdoms and states over the course of centuries. The most famous of these societies, the so-called "Kingdom of the Skull", developed in the rainforest on the windward side of the volcanic "Mountains of Hell", but fell into ruin at an uncertain date, although local traditions attribute its collapse to provoking the wrath of a deity known as the "Flaming Skull". Nonetheless, the islanders remain numerous across the island's breadth, maintaining a rich variety of distinctive cultures and dozens of different languages, albeit all sharing what may be a distant kinship with the Gbe languages of coastal West Africa.

It was in the late 1400s when Portuguese mariners first chanced upon the Island of the Skull and shared their knowledge with other Europeans. Nonetheless, both the mosasaur-haunted waters encircling the island and its own hostile terrain have discouraged large-scale European colonial expeditions, although some daring buccaneers and corsairs have nonetheless succeeded in establishing commerce with indigenous communities on the coast. Many of these swashbucklers covet the fabled riches of the ancient Kingdom of the Skull, but few who have penetrated its interior have come back to tell the tale…

And here's the (admittedly Google-translated) Portuguese version: