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

[Jack Daniels]

I have never used GIMP, or any GIMP/PS-like program, before and I found this tutorial to be extremely easy to follow. My first draft is below;



General pointers/advice would be welcome, specifically; I would like there to be a delta at the mouth of the river near Split, any tricks for how to make that look? Also, I'd like to indicate that there are breakers in the ocean at a couple locations, indicating shallower water. I tried to do some wavy lines like I do on my hand drawn maps, and it looked dumb, any suggestions?

I do have a follow-up for RSIxidor's problem with inserting text and curving it and having it appear as a bunch of bubbles. I had the same problem and skipped that step until going back at the very end after I'd finished everything else. While poking around with the bubbles showing I deselected the Path Tool by selecting the Brush tool, the bubbles disappeared and the text was visible. Everything else worked fine from there.
The bubbles make it hard to see if your path is the correct length as you have to go a couple steps before you can see the text and I'm not really sure of their purpose. So, my text seems to be lopsided a bit, but that's how I got past that problem. I'm probably not going to curve my text in the future, seems like more work than it's worth.