My first map.

[ravells]

Thanks for the tips guys so far guys. Okay, I made some changes to the grass. I added a texture made from a picture of grass, and used a much different pale green color. Let me know what you think.

Next, I could use some advice on how to transition the different areas. How would you transition from the grass to the water, or from the water to the dock, or from the grass to the road. Any help is apprecaited!

Looking good so far, crazybear. A commonly used method to transition between different areas is to add a faint, dark outer glow. That makes the land 'stand off' the water a little bit. I used one in the 'Seven Dials' entry for the coastline and for the roads. I also used an outer glow to make the text labels stand out. Hope this helps.

Another Alternative is to use a brush with variable pressure, which I again used on the coastline of the 7 dials. It's not very apparent but if you zoom into the map and look at the coastline outline carefully, you will see that at some points the outline almost disappears - you can see this at Gosport Harbour on the Seven Dials map.

One word of caution, beware repeating textures for organic fills because if one can see the tiling of the texture it really takes away from the effect. The grass fill on your map has this problem a little bit, but it's easily fixed. Just use a clone brush (not sure if Gimp has one) to mix up the texture a little bit and break up the repetitive edges.

Ravs