Heyla, folks...

I stumbled across this Forum while looking for a way to potentially wrap maps around globes. (Some very interesting threads from around 2008-2009 on this!)

I can't claim to be a cartographer, though I love maps. I refer to my husband as "the overly tall Hobbit," since he also loves maps.

I've done maps with pencil and paper, later inking over the roughs.

Back about 1992, I did a series of some 30 maps of Anne McCaffrey's Pern, as my husband and I did the Threadfall Charts for that lady's world. Those were done with Windows Paint, the OLD Windows Paint, like, the one that came with Windows 3.1. On a 386 machine with 4 MB (yes, that's MB, not GB!) of memory, and a 40 MB hard drive. The maps were around 2250 x 3000 pixels, black & white, and I had to work at the pixel level, making a few changes here and there, then wait for the machine to catch up to me. (Been using home computers since 1982 -- my first was an Osborne 1, with TWO 89K SSSD 5.25 floppy drives and 64K of RAM, along with a built in monochrome 52 charaacter wide screen. Stunning height of technology there -- running CP/M!)

Later, I had an improved version of Paint, called PhotoFinish, which served me well for most of what I was doing until this spring, when I went to a machine with Win 7 Pro,and my poor 16 bit PhotoFinish would no longer work. I miss it, becuse I haven't found anything, not the new Paint, not Irfanview, nor PhotoShop Elements 12, which can do some of the things PhotoFinish could. PhotoFinish didn't have layers, but I could do some nice stuff with it. (Right now, I don't have access to any of it because the NEW machine blue-screened itself to death, and I am waiting on my tech to have time to work on it. I'm on my husband's laptop.)

I was tinkering with positioning different locations on a Google Map and trying to see if there was any sort of pattern I could use for an Image I had, and my design engineer husband pointed out that I couldn't really see a pattern unless it was on a globe. True. And me not knowing how to do such a thing, started searching.

And stumbled in here.