Hello Everyone!

I'm new to this forum and I'm new to making digital maps. Though I've been working on an invented island country since tweenhood, so I have drawn quite a few amateurish maps on paper and in recent years even played around with Photoshop to clean them up. My invented country constant state of development and I work not only on maps but also on history, mythology, government, etc. The longer I work on this project the more sophisticated my map needs become, hence why I joined this forum. I would love some guidance, tips, tricks from you talented contributors on how to make the map I want.

My map making journey started with just drawing random map-looking blobs, to understanding that real geological formations couldn't possibly look like that, which lead to me turning my island into a real live coastline collage: ie I'd copy/paste, flip/mirror coastines and boundaries that I liked from existing islands/countries to sort of make a realistic looking map. Then I discovered AutoRealm and saved hours of my life. So now that I have the coastline figured out, I'm moving on to mountains and rivers. In the future I might even consider putting the island on "google earth" (or my own version of it).

Otherwise I'm a 30 year old Swedish cat lady in the middle of a career change from legal work to software development. If I'm not reading or playing Civilization, I spend my time figuring out things that have to do with my invented country... My husband likes to joke that subconsciously I'm leaving my law career behind because right now my country requires me to learn computer related stuff. If that is true that I'm a bigger nerd that I thought I was.

Before joining I've been lurking reading other people's questions and studying the different tutorials, which are amazing! I've also been fiddling a bit with Wilbur, but my knowledge of math is not good enough for me to understand what I'm doing on that program despite tutorials. Besides, while the Wilbur mountain textures look great, they're not really the look I'm after for my map... I'm looking forward to having cool discussions!