Hello from the Eastern Shore
Hi, I'm Andy from Maryland's upper Eastern Shore. I've stopped in and looked around a few times recently and figured that was a good enough reason for an introduction.
As a nerdy kid in a farm setting, I had oodles of time to find things to amuse myself. My folks would get the big leftover printing company paper rolls, the ones with 20+ pounds of usable paper that were too small for the machines to handle. Not sure how many I went through, a couple at any rate, but I would do sprawling maps of anything that TV and literature would fire my imagination with, Gilligan's Island, Moonbase Alpha, The Shire, Mirkwood, etc. I took engineering graphics electives in high school, probably my favorite classes.
About that time I got into RPGs, starting out with AD&D and then moving to Chaosium's Runequest and GDW's Traveller. In the process outlining a couple worlds and various scenarios within them. A few starship deckplans as a diversion, etc. Mostly my world maps have been hand drawn and very utilitarian, graph paper based, with simple elevation lines for mountains, colored marker forests and blue line rivers; in lieu of artistically rendered landscapes. I did try to trace on a light table; in Tolkienesque style quill and ink, the last world I had started for RQ before life's vicissitudes put a major hiatus on RPGs in general. I almost never finish anything, a personal failing...
I'm also fascinated with cave cartography, being an NSS caver I even had occasion to do a survey trip. That didn't turn out to be quite as gripping an activity as I hoped. It takes a great deal of time and relatively little movement, at least in the passages that I was assigned, and you don't do the drawing if you don't do the data acquisition. It's kind of cool to do actual "dungeon delving", so I still cave recreationally. It helped me to design better dungeons too.
I have used the old Microsoft Image Composer for image editing in the past and recently downloaded GIMP (which I discovered through this site). I have also dabbled in CAD for some years, designing a few simple mechanisms in my line of work which oddly enough ended up being farming rather than anything to do with drawing. I still find the occasion in this line of work for maps and designs of less fanciful nature. I hope to increase my computer skills as an adjunct to my rather meager artistic ability.
There is so much amazing work here, thank you all for sharing it, I hope to learn a great deal. I've blathered enough for now.
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