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

[Spiral Thoughts]

Much appreciation for this tutorial. The tone of the tutorial was welcoming and supportive.

However, I am confused on two parts.

On page 12 of 22, the tutorial says:
"Now go to Select->Select by Color and choose one of your black lines. Little moving selection lines should show up around every like you just make. Now go to Select → Shrink... and choose 3 pixels. This will make the selected area shrink by 3 pixels from every edge. Now choose the bucket fill tool and fill in all of the selected areas with white. This will make your roads nice, parallel lines with an organic hand drawn feel."

I did as you said . . . but once I was finished, I couldn't figure out how to deselect the roads without completely deleting them. That is one area where I am having trouble.

My next issue came with the Paths step (page 15 of 22). It says in the tutorial:
"Using this tool, click once on either side of the town you want to label. This should produce a thin line, a path, across the town. Now click on the middle of the path and pull up. You should see the path bend into a curve. Try to get this curve to be where you would like the text to appear near your town. Once your curve is acceptable, select Layer → Text along Path. This will cause the path you made to contort into the shape of the name you just typed."

I placed the two purple dots on either side of the text and pulled up in the middle as it said . . . but that only created a purple fuzzy thing off to the left . . . it stared at me. I was frightened .

And I'm sure once these obstacles have been corrected, I will delve further into the tutorial and come back further confused. I'm just cool like that.

Thank you to anyone who can help me!