Thanks for the tips guys. As for showing the work, I am not quite there yet, it is really the shell of a world so far, only 1 continent is finished so far, another was totally revised and enlarged, I have a pretty good picture in my head of where it all will go. The finished map is entirely hand drawn and written btw and so far I do not see myself going over to a total digital drawing. I had to take a crash course in Photo shop because I very soon realized that I needed to have everything in an atlas type format so I knew the relative position of everything. Of course at that point I began to realize that I had to be careful now where I placed things because of climate zones and take those things into consideration with what I had had in mind from earlier. So I took picture of my maps with my iPhone and then drew them in photoshop, started experimenting with custom brushes (mountains) and rivers etc. Still however I think I will stick with hand drawn maps for my own sake and will probably eventually put them up here. Right now they are in such a state that they are solely for my sanities sake over creating the world.

I have tried using real world islands, mainly been looking at Indonesia and Phillipines, but I had not looked into lakes, so thanks for that one! Quickly, to google earth!