[Award Winner] Using GIMP to Create an Artistic Regional RPG Map

[RobA]

Post 13:Finishing the land up.

Forests are done the exact same way. EDIT - A Good Tutorial to making nice forests in this style in Gimp is here (Thanks arsheeshA). I used the same bump map as for the grass but increased the depth effect. I also put all the forest stuff below the mountain layers, so the mountains would appear to come out through the forest. You could do it the other way, and the forests would appear to run on the mountains. (as long as you make the forest colour layer slightly transparent. Here I duplicated the forest layer colour layer and set the mode to Grain Merge to emphasize the colours a bit.


This is where you can start playing with colours to get them balances, adjusting the hue and saturation, etc….Here I also added a new bump map hinting at under-water features. I also added a layer of low detail , small scale cloud noise over the whole map in overlay mode, and toned down the dirt bumpiness.


The last thing is to stroke the shoreline to give it a less jaggy edge. Go to the Chanels tab and right click on the Land Mask channel, and go Channel to Selection. Set the foreground colour to the High Dirt colour (or a colour that complements the piece), and stroke the selection (Edit->Stroke Selection) with a 3 px fuzzy paintbrush:


Rivers can be added by drawing with a fine fuzzy black brush on the “Grass” layer mask.
It helps to apply a small blur and then sharpen to clean up the lines:


For additional effect, this mask can be turned into a bump map and applied to give the rivers a bit of a bevel:


End of Part 2.