This is me trying out a "hand-drawn" look...

[krolac]

Well, this map has no name, and I don't think it ever will get one, it is just me trying out a hand-drawn map style, and I think I could use some advice. I started out with Gidde's Hand Drawn Map Tutorial for GIMP and tried to convert it to Photoshop, and ran in to a couple of problems.

I can't get the tree / mountain / symbol brushes in Photoshop (CS3) to still be transparent but with a white color as a background. If I just use the brushes the result is a big mess since I cant "cover a black part of a mountain with a white part of a mountain in front of it". Hope you understand what I mean here... it seems GIMP is capable of this? For this map, I did a workaround painting with the mountain brush all the different mountains I would use, then create a layer beneath them and manually paint in the white areas on this layer. Then I could add them to the map with the Clone Stamp tool. However, this way I lose a lot of options you have with a regular brush, such as the size jitter. Is there an easier way?

Next, my rivers don't look very good. They are basically stroked paths with a faded brush, then blurred. All suggestions welcome here.

I also cant seem to find a simple way to get the mountains to cover the black coastline, look at the top of the bottommost mountain chain, you can clearly see the coastline in a mountain. I suspect this is related to the brush issue above. The mountains layer is set to Multiply, and the colors get really screwed up if i change it to any opaque mode.

Also, I can't duplicate the results in Gidde's tutorial with the "bleeding ink" effect using Photoshop. Any tips here? My labels layer is duplicated, blurred slightly and then each duplicated layer is moved a couple of pixels in different directions.

Lastly, I just applied some "random" filter on the final (?) map, I think it was Poster Edges...

All comments are welcome!