Actually, no reason other than I am still playing around with Pasis's tutorial style. Thus, the reason it is so long between posts showing my progress. I spend more time playing around than actually doing some work.
Previously, I have just always hand drawn my world maps using poster sized paper on a drafting table. Those projects were paid commissions and I no longer possess them. This project is also some of the first computer based mapping I have done outside of work since I abandoned my Udava project. The maps I created for Udava were done back in a time covering 1988 to 1996. Working on maps in those days was (to me anyway) more difficult and time-consuming than doing them by hand. I gave up on computer map drawing for about 10 years until I got into GIS software. Now I am trying to get back into computer based map drawing. I'm going to keep playing around with the different styles I have learned here. Otherwise, I use ESRI's ArcMap, ArcView, ArcInfo, et. al. and Quantum GIS.
My previous project, Urtopis, was done using ArcMap initially before using Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, and GIMP to finish it. The only problem I see with using a color shaded relief map is that putting forests, grasslands, etc. would cover up the relief terrain. Thus, I abandoned that style and looked for others.
Of course, I ended up breaking my left hand (primary drawing hand) when I fell off a ladder weekend before last (02 Oct).
rmfr