Hello, fellow cartographers!

After several years of reading tutorials but not posting (during which time it seems my first account was pruned due to the latter?), I think it's time to step out of the shadows.

First things first: cartography is more of an adjunct to my other hobbies than a hobby of its own. My main hobby is creating languages, along with the settings where they're spoken (I'm also a graduate student working on an M.A. in linguistics, so language is something of a professional interest as well). I've been working on one particular language/world for over a decade and have some information about it on my website (here). The latest version of my map of that world's main continent is accessible from the homepage there, and is the main reason I'm here.

I'm currently working through several of the awesome tutorials here to make that continent map better. The original version of it was based on Mark Rosenfelder's map-drawing tips (here), but I'm looking to make the terrain more realistic. To that end, I'm going through mbartelsm's "Realistic Mountains with Photoshop and Wilbur" tutorial, with a few tweaks, to turn my hand-shaded mountains into a rudimentary heightmap for further processing in Wilbur (which I have yet to actually use, heh heh). I've already updated the hills with a different method to get the lighting on them consistent, and I'd be willing to share my method if anyone's interested. I plan on eventually replacing the current terrain colors with a series of gradient maps, based on what I've read in more tutorials than I can name.

So, in a nutshell, that's who I am and where I'm going. I look forward to being more involved here!