[Award Winner] Making Photo-realistic Trees in GIMP: A Mini-Tut

[Nowhere Man]

First and foremost, as my first post - Thank you for this fantastic tutorial!

I've recently gained the desire to learn a bit of cartography. Originally I used RobA's tutorial which helped me get familiar with GIMP and then came across your tutorial which I've been practicing at for some time now. I've also looked through your projects and am always impressed with how your land comes out which is the reason for my post.

What method(s) do you use to plan out your general land? I've attempted to emulate it several times but find it always lacking the 'feel' you manage to capture which, to me, is somewhere between a dragonesque feel and final fantasy art style.

Would you mind revealing any methods to your style of basic land generation?

[arsheesh]

First and foremost, as my first post - Thank you for this fantastic tutorial!

I've recently gained the desire to learn a bit of cartography. Originally I used RobA's tutorial which helped me get familiar with GIMP and then came across your tutorial which I've been practicing at for some time now. I've also looked through your projects and am always impressed with how your land comes out which is the reason for my post.

What method(s) do you use to plan out your general land? I've attempted to emulate it several times but find it always lacking the 'feel' you manage to capture which, to me, is somewhere between a dragonesque feel and final fantasy art style.

Would you mind revealing any methods to your style of basic land generation?

Hi Nowhere Man, sorry for the late reply, been a bit preoccupied at the moment.

Glad the tutorial has been of use to you! As for the land shapes, I wrote a little tutorial on this over at my blog a couple of years ago which talks about my method. In regards to "feel" of this style, I think this is sort of just an intuition thing. I sort of just let the fractal clouds guide me through creating the main land masses, with an aim toward making them feel, as you describe "dragonesque". I'm not sure that there's much I can tell you about this other than keep practicing. The more you play at it the more confident you will become and the easier it will become.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Edward Tait]

Greetings Hivemind. Been going through this tutorial and have a couple of questions.
(I know its been a while since this post was started and last answered but taking a shot anyway. And keep clicking and adjusting till something magical happens LOL)

1. After Isolating the Forests on page 4 does the selection remain active during the next step of adding individual trees?

2. Now in the “Yet More Refinement for the Forest Outline” I am not able to bucket fill the selection with white from the Channels Tab (Gimp 2.10.32). When I do it on the Trees layer, I end up with the forest cloud and a bunch of white spots. Nothing like Figure 12 (where the trees are also part of the cloud colors). Is there something I am missing, or should it look that way?

I am playing around between this tutorial and others on a large size map and am just beginning to learn how to use GIMP. I know that my results will not be exactly what is shown in examples but so far, I have been close enough to get the idea and able to play around with some of the settings to get something that is acceptable for my purpose.

This tutorial and the others have been a huge help with this old dog.

Thank you for any suggestions