Mixing hand drawn and randomly generated elements?

[Aristotle]

Tried messing around with Ascension's tutorial tonight. So many (very different) styles here that I want to try. This one worked alright. I couldn't follow the tutorial exactly as I started with hand drawn shapes and not clouds. I may redo this one, one continent at a time, to tweak some things.

Oh... and this map made my game rig chug. I ran out of memory at one point and couldn't render any more clouds. Of course the image is 25"x12.5" and 500dpi, and I'm sure I wasn't working very efficiently.

[Ascension]

Some pretty interesting effects there in the mountains, I dig em. Might try to get me something like that for plateaus. Good job. Here is what you can do for exact precision while still using clouds. Make a black and medium gray clouds layer (50% gray). Take your original image and put this as a new layer on top of the layer stack. Make a new layer and fill in the continent shapes with white. Name this layer "anything". Delete the original image layer. You should now have 2 layers. Reduce the opacity of the "anything" layer to anything you like above 50%. This will retain your shapes and lighten the clouds underneath. Merge down (ctrl-E) then you can follow along with the tutorial easily.

Also, working on full earths really makes my gaming rig chug too so I only do 1 continent at a time then flatten it and save as a jpg. Once I have all the continents done and flattened it's much easier to make one large blank document and then add each continent in on its own layer, position it, and then flatten the new image too. One full earth I did without flattening anything was 6 gigs so I'll never do that again