Dear cartographers,
it's a pleasure for me to be here and very nice of you to ask new members to introduce themselves so here I go:
I'm from Berlin, Germany, 28 years old and a PhD-student in mathematics. I always loved fantasy stories, drama class and writing fictional texts. One day a friend suggested to put all of this together and play Pathfinder. So now I am a role-playing geek. I do enjoy playing a character but I even more like inventing a whole world and playing not only thousands of NPC but also gods and thelike. Thus, I am the Dungeon Master of a small group of players, creating a new world and testing some new rules. Therefore, I need of course incredible many maps for the continent, the countries, the regions, the cities... And I want them to look great! Unfortunatly, I am not really talented in drawing and bringing all the pictures I have in mind to reality. That's why I'd rather use a computer to do all the artistic stuff and that's why I am here. I just decided to be sick of drawing with pencils (which I did for some hours now) and scanning and printing and redrawing on a smaller scale on pixeled maps with large country names. I want to have them all digital so I can zoom in and keep the proportions, landscape and locations fixed. Until now, I used graphic programs only rarely for very small tasks and I don't even have a graphic pad. Thus I expected this goal to be an unreachable dream of mine. But after I have found links to your increadibly cool tutorials with Gimp and all the impressive maps you guys posted here I am hopful to achieve it. I am eager to learn everything I need and by now I am sad to have a 40h/week job because I'd rather go through this forum and start producing my own cool maps. Nonetheless I'm already in love with this guild and proud to be part of it. I hope to soon be able to show you first Gimp-drawn map of my world so I can share with you what you made me able to make by share your wisdom with me!
Giddy greets
Giordana