Hello everybody, I'm really glad to have found this forum, and I'll start by introducing myself, as a courtesy.

Who ?

I'm a 16-year-old french -thus I'll use an imperfect english- "geek" in the sense that I'm passionate about new technologies and various other things, generally not really popular... but well.
I'm at the moment studying literature in my last year of high school, and I don't know where to go when I'll have to choose for my real, serious, studies. May I go to an art school and develop the artist part of my soul that I feel and hereby trying to reach some kind of ideal ? Or may I rather go to a sure way of studies ? WELL, enough of my teen-babbling stuff.

What ?

I've always felt this need to make my own world, a world that expresses my own feelings and judgements on mankinds' History. Obviously, I've been (because I'm not really into it nowaday) a big fan of RPGs, both video games and papers. Though, paper RPG aren't popular at all now in the youth, video games and more than that, MMORPG are way more popular. There's a good thing in that (and in the popularity of the Lord of the Rings) : most of the people are now aware of what is an elf, a dwarf, etc... and they also seem to be more tolerant toward those who spend time making fantasy or just unreal worlds. That's a good thing... the bad thing is the real presence of a kinda an extremism in the game system and logic of the plot. Most of the young players of my generation are not really patient, most of the time they only seek some good dragon-killing, or a fast and exciting battle, with their wizard-barbarian-thieft super monkey.
I'm exaggerating, but for some people it's pretty accurate...

Enough said, let's begin with what brings me in there.
As I said, I'm really into fantasy world making, and especially map making. I often draw maps, give names to the locations and try to keep a certain logic in the languages, then I set the basis of them, etc.

My work

I'm using Photoshop CS2, but it's pretty recent, and I don't have a good experience of this complicated soft. I've made one map so far, but there's only the continents, because I don't really know how to present the names, etc. I even tried to start making mountains and reliefs using the Bevel (I don't know if it's called like that in english Photoshop.) function in a layer. I'm kinda lost, that's why I'm here to read tutorials, and also to share and learn to/from the others !
Other stuff includes short-stories or random texts that are more or less logical, sorry for you all, but it's in french, I'm not enough confident to start writing poetry or anything serious in english yet...
I'm also a big lover of foreign languages, such as Icelandic, Japanese, and actually all of them, but I'm not serious enough to learn them seriously !
That's all, thanks in advance.