Hi Ravs

Thanks for the kind words. Its all done in GIMP, but the height field is done using Terranoise (Thanks Arcana for posting it). The heightfield is essential because its used on almost every layer.

First I colour select an area in the sea, udjusting the threshhold to get the right amount. I then paste that selection over a new layer containing the land texture and clear the selected area. The land texture is actually a very blurred and colourised version of the farmland texture that you posted. Its had a few noise brushes painted over it.

The sea is a layer below that is simply done using the Filters-Render-Clouds-Plasma, which creates a muli-coloured noise pattern and then colourising it to blue.

The stroke on the coastline is simply that, a 0.7 pix wide solid black stroke following the line of the selection taken from the heightfield, on its own layer.

I then applied height fields three times, firstly to the surface texture. Then I copy a section from the heightfield using the colour select with some feathering, to correspond with the middle ranges in height and paste this to its own layer. Ajust the colour levels to the selection ranges from black to white again. Another layer is used with the same selected area, filled with a brownish rock texture and then the new height field is used to bump map it. The process is repeated for the highest areas using a grey rock texture. Before applying the bump map some lowering of each layer's opacity may be necessary.

After reading and following RobA's Gimp tutorial I also make a black/white layer from the land selection, just in case. You never know when you might need a layer mask, but I havn't needed one so far on this map.

As to scale, I dont know. Big man, really big! I suppose it should be roughly half the size of the surface area of the earth.

Cheers
Torq