[Award Winner] Fast and Easy Artistic Maps in the GIMP

[maackey]

To make a river delta you could just make the brush a bit wider at the end to make a triangular shape connected to the river. You could also draw a few smaller streams splaying out into the bay. Don't make a lot, and make sure they are very close to the beach.

Shallow water typically has a lighter color than the deeper ocean/sea. This is pretty easy if you have layers and channels for your land/sea boundary. If you have no idea what that means, don't worry, just keep trying some more tutorials on the site I went through about two dozen (including this one) before I made my first map, they are generally very helpful.

As for general pointers/advice: ease up on the mountains, put them in clusters closer together, not spread uniformly across the whole map. Try adding in some more asymetry with the land/water. Save your image as a jpg instead of a pdf

[WithAK]

I seem to be having some difficulties with this tutorial. I use the latest version of GIMP so that might be some of the problem, but after I have made all of the mountains and exported them to brush form, they come out much smaller and sort of... "smushed". It looks a little like someone took the 400 x 400 mountain images and made them smaller using Paint; they are incredibly pixelated and do not look at all how they look in the guide.

It's a little frustrating, since otherwise I haven't had any problems, but this is an important step I think. I went over the instructions to make sure I hadn't made a silly mistake somewhere, and I don't see anywhere where I differed. It's quite perplexing, does anybody know what might be happening?

[Takarda]

Hi, I'm new to map-making and this site. This is the first tutorial I looked at, and if the rest of this site is even half as awesome, I'll be thrilled. Thanks for the great and simple tips!

[Pluvian]

Hi everyone, another newcomer here. Is there any way of using this animated brush technique in Photoshop (currently using CS5)?
If not I guess I need to learn Gimp as well

[Jason Stephens]

Same here, I paint what looks like 1 mm x 1 mm lines of mountains. I can't figure it out and also the instruction to select the Circle 07 (9x9) Brush... there's no such brush in the folder. I'm lost.

[RobA]

Same here, I paint what looks like 1 mm x 1 mm lines of mountains. I can't figure it out and also the instruction to select the Circle 07 (9x9) Brush... there's no such brush in the folder. I'm lost.

In the 2.8+ version of gimp, the individual brush sizes have been replaced. Just pick the circle (hard) brush and size it to 9px.

-Rob A>

[Jaqen Hagar]

I tried this tutorial, and step by step, I made a success for in maitriser a little more GIMP.
This is not very impressive, but what I learnt is very hepful. Thank you for your tutorial.

[Erroll]

EDIT: Figured it out.. I needed the tool options window. How unintuitive. I am cruising along now.. thanks.

I followed this tutorial but I can't seem to get the brush to be anything but tiny pixelated mountains. It won't let me edit the brush. I am not sure what I am doing wrong. How do I get the brush to come out as 400x400?

Thanks

[Micah Doulos]

I was making some detailed trees and tested out the new brush when I had 3 trees and it worked fine (but seemed to produce one tree more often than the other 2). I made 2 more trees and when I went to test it out with 5 trees it would only produce the tree at the top of the list despite me choosing random and 5 ranks. What's going on? The size I set was 400x500, wouldn't work despite multiple attempts and fiddling. I then tried 500x500, no effect. 400x400, still producing only the tree at the top of the list. Then I finally deleted trees 4 and 5 and it wouldn't work with the exact same settings it worked at earlier with three trees. What's going on???

[Micah Doulos]

I figured this out. When you save your brush the first time, it automatically fills in the # of cells as the number of layers in the file. If you add layers after your first save, make sure to adjust the number of cells. The # of cells should always be equal to the # of layers, just like the # of ranks.