March entry: Where are the rivers?

[Benarius]

Thanks for your welcoming words!

You mentioned the rules to this contest. I can only think of that there aren't enough rivers, yet. I haven't actually counted or checked how many there are in each square. And the missing grid. If there is something else, please let me know.

I am actually quite surprised myself with the outcome. After defining the major shape, I just applied different blending options over cloud filters and applied gradient maps. Out of those I selected parcial areas and repeated the process with the (small) mountains using bevel and emboss filter. And more filters.

My work on PS till now was basically limited to scanning, digital image processing and text art.

I will eagerly work through the many tutorials from this forum to learn proven techniques and hope to someday force a little "oh" and "ah" in the crowd.

During this work the most fun was really testing a lot of different settings of filters and mixing of gradient maps, which I never realy used. For hours just watching and tweaking. The downside, recalling it to recreate it, no way...lol. But with a lot practice, the basics will stick. There's always the copy and paste layer styles. But random outcomes is sometimes more intresting than what you originally planned for.

Hope I get some more things done before the closing. Making this map was so much fun and forced some hidden creationism to the surface.

Regards
Benarius