Great tut, Gidde!

A couple of things that might either make life better or worse, depending on your perspective.

in Step 5 (page 16)
Right-click on the Mountains layer (which should be directly above Mountain Shading) and click Merge Down. Now we have one layer that has both the mountains and their shading on it. To make sure, hide the Mountain Shading layer and the whole kit and kaboodle should disappear. Unhide it, and make all of the white transparent (Layer Transparency Color to Alpha). The Color → → to Alpha defaults to white, so click ok
Try just changing the layer mode of the merged down layer to multiply. This will have the same effect as the Colour to Alpha step. The only real advantage to this is that by keeping the mountains on their own layer and white filled, you can add more mountains later that block out other mountains using the brush in normal mode, or behind by setting the brush mode to behind!

Also, I'm sure it has been mentioned, but when you get to labeling (page 26) Inkscape is a great (free) option for labeling far easier and with many more options than gimp.


Lastly, I like the ink bleed method. I usually generate a plasma map and displace using that, but this seems much easier. Thanks for the tip!

-Rob A>