Why can't I get the pattern fill to work properly?

[hohum]

For your mountain ranges you may want to make brushes. You can trace or copy the outlines of the mountains that you are using as your source and then save them as a .gbr in your brushes folder. Or you can save them with multiple layers as a brush pipe (,gih). You will want to start with a transparent background and then consider whether you want to leave the mountains completely transparent or opaque. Look at Giidde's hand drawn map tutorial (it also just has a lot of good tips for using GIMP) which will also point you to Ironmetals hand drawn map elements tutorial. Let me know if you get stuck. And yes, map making takes up a lot of time.

[Jared Synn]

Thanks guys!

Here's my problem. I definitely don't want realistic looking mountains. I've never liked maps that were part hand drawn, part real photo-like. And I want to keep the same style of drawings (ie the same type of mountains, colors, etc) that appear on the Taladas map because I plan on integrating my world with that one and I want the maps to look like they're from the same source, if that makes any sense. In other words, I want to duplicate that style of map.

The learning curve is difficult because I have very precious little free time as it is, and if it's all eaten up doing tech stuff, then I get nothing done. That's why I was thinking about paying someone to do a map for me based on my line drawings. I thought I saw a few posts here about people doing that. Or do you guys think maybe the learning curve is not as steep as it seems to me right now?