December entry: Untitled so far

[Ascension]

Yeah, I do the big thing on purpose...gives me more room and flexibility for ideas, monsters, clans, kingdoms, stories - if ever decided to get serious and sit down and write one. The bathymetry was really time-consuming but I've been thinking about it for a long time (I've been wanting to learn how to do the Mid-Atlantic Ridge thing for quite some time). So what I did was actually plan out some tectonic plates, which I never do but at least my mountains now have a real basis for being where they are, and then using selections I made a couple of rough rings and then, again using the selections, I made some paths that I stroked with a variation of my roof thatch brush (a really big one with 1000 spacing) for each plate (so that the lines don't overlap into other plates thus creating a bit of an offset), then I duplicated this layer many times and blurred them all in a progressing size from 1 to 10, reduced opacity, merged, some black airbrushing over the lighter clouds to create deep spots and white around the coasts, lighting effects, and kept the original merged layer and applied a bevel to it (which still needs a bit of work but it's a start). Looking at this first image is kind of embarrassing since my current screenie looks so much different, and I hope, better. Climate zones done, random color splotches, forests, and now starting on rivers. This is a full size screenie of just one continent but uploading a smaller version to fit here loses a lot of the detail.