Ok, so to get a nice style contrast I started this one based entirely on the gimp translation i did of ascension's atlas tut. I think I managed to get the mountains in the right place after much wrangling, but the colors are driving me crazy. No matter what I do, the desert either blinds me or is grey.

I'm thinking that tomorrow I'll start trying to put the mountains from this version onto the color base from the first version and see how that looks. If I darken it a bunch and put some land contours on, maybe I can still get away with no forests atlas-style