[Award Winner] Mosaic Tile Map in Photoshop (& GIMP)

[pyrandon]

Now I'll tile the border for my map. First I hide all the sea tiles that would overlap the border. I click the layer mask thumbnail in the "Sea" layer, then Marquee a rectangle around the edges of the land, followed by Select>Inverse. I fill this area with black, thus hiding the blue tiles. (Do not Deselect yet, though.)

Now I create a new layer on top of my stack entitled "Border". Of course, the possibilities for patterns and effects in the border are limitless. I'll start with a simple frame by (you guessed it) following the same tile fill procedure I've used for both land and sea. I first Select>Inverse so the land area is the selected area again. Then Select>Modify>Expand by just over half my tile size (I'm going to use big 30 px tiles for the border, so I expand by 17 px). Then I choose new tile colors and follow the procedure (Action) from before, expanding until my edges are filled.

As you can see from Image 1, I alternated colors for variety. You will also notice that the corners contain angled tiles; this is a result of the stroking process, and I like the effect for my ancient map. If you would like to avoid this, either erase the corner tiles by hand, or bypass the entire stroking of work paths system altogether by drawing the lines of tiles in by hand (click one end, then Shift-click the other is easiest.)

Now, you can stop there if you like or do any number of fancy-schmancy border patters. In Image 2 you can see I added some simple, triangular flourishes to my border. I did this by placing a layer mask revealing all over the Border later, then selecting a square marquee, Select>Transform Selection to rotate it 45%, placing it in the center of each side of the border and filling it with black to hide that triangle of border. Finally, I hand brushed in the new tiles in a newly-created layer called "Border Decor" & erased excess tiles. Pretty simple. The corner lines I created completely by hand, masking out the overlapping Border tiles as well.

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