Initial Editing Phase Part One - Continental Shelves and Oceans
At this point, I strayed slightly from the previously mentioned tutorial. Rather than building up the land masses from the very beginning, I fired up the Prescale paintbrush and concentrated on expanding the continental shelves. I also worked on removing some of the lesser continental masses and digging some deeper oceans where they were needed in order to keep things from looking too crowded.
I took my time with this, spending somewhere between 3 and 4 hours just working on the continental shelves and oceans. I forced myself to take breaks every so often so that I wouldn't accidentally trap myself into an unconscious pattern of what and where things were expanded or dug deeper.
After all was said and done, I ended up with the four major continental masses I originally envisioned along with three minor continental masses and several island groupings. I'm not 100% on the islands just yet, and I'm thinking that I might trim down the eastern peninsula of the North America-like continent some to make things a little less crowded in that area. Perhaps I'll convert it into another island grouping or another minor continent.
I've decided to leave the left and right edges of the map as unexplored areas for the time being. One of the reasons behind that has to do with using version 2.3 of FTPro. It tends to be a bit buggy about editing at the edges of the map. I tried the latest update a while back, but it gave me problems when shifting back and forth between FTPro and Wilbur which I may still need to do in the long run if my alternate methods don't work out the way I want them to.
In any event, the next major step is going to be filling in the continental masses with some nice, juicy terrain. I'm going to give things a rest for the remainder of the day, however, and just let it all stew in my head for the night to see if anything interesting comes to mind.
GW
P.S. Did I mention that I actually got a couple days off? We all did since a few of the other stores offered to step up and give us a break now that the holidays are over. Sleep . . . . Sleeeeeeep!
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