I thought I’d try another experiment, I’m working a bit now with forest techniques.

Next one, I think I’ll take it a little farther — plan the image, for one thing, and  get a few more terrain types and the like in.  The rivers need a little more work, too.

Actually, I think I may have to do things fairly backwards.  In this case I did the land/water, then the rivers, then the forest (which isn’t too bad), but I’m not pleased with how the rivers meet the sea.  I think I may need to instead cut away at the land mask where I want the rivers, then fill from there.  I’m depending on some almost subtle interactions between the image layers here that are really hard to do by hand.

Also, unrelated to this picture, I think I may back ‘Thing a Day’ off to every couple of days.  I’m more or less back in the habit of analysis/writing/drawing regularly, but I find that I only have time to think or write each day, if I want to get a reasonable amount of sleep each day.

If I don’t sleep, I don’t do any writing, and thinking gets hard (and my job is mostly thinking), so cutting sleep is no longer a viable option.  When I’m not doing so much analysis I can probably do more writing again.