Thank you for the kind words Pyrandon. I owe so much to this little group and to the guy at zombienirvana.com that it's good to feel as if I might be giving a tiny measure back.

I'm really liking the ability to quickly and easily change the landforms simply by changing the pattern in the texture part of the bevel and emboss effect.

Doing it again, I'd probably do the mountains as a selection mask like I did the river, so I could apply a subtle cloud shading with a couple shades of gold or brown or greyish. That would also increase my ability to go back and recolor parts. I could see a virtuoso photoshop artist(not me) doing almost all painting in grayscale in alpha channels.

This has kind of gotten away from my wacom tablet(which I still love), but many of those little squiggles I made would have been a whole lot more difficult without benefit of that pressure sensitive stylus.

I've been trying to get a better feel for my stylus by using it for a lot of my computer work, instead of the mouse. I've gotten to where I can successfully click without dragging most of the time, and my pointer pretty reliably goes where I expect it to when I put stylus to pad. It's still a little inconvenient and without a scroll wheel it will never replace my mouse, but I am getting the feel for a new tool. My wife is a pro with the pressure sensitivity, I think her calligraphy experience tells.