STEP THREE: Land Tiles
Now we'll lay tiles that will make up the land, so roll your sleeves up, mix up some virtual thinset and we'll get a-laying.
1. After my last step I still have the ants marching around my land masses. Now I activate the Marquee Tool and right-click inside the selection, then choose "Make Work Path." In the "tolerance" window that pops up, I choose 0.5 pixel (the lowest possible tolerance), and click "ok."
2. Create a new layer on top, labeled "Land".
3. Click the Brush Tool & select the tile brush I created earlier.
4. Select a foreground and background color that meld nicely (perhaps even use a color scheme generator, such as Color Jack or this one).
5. Now I click the Paths tab in the layers window [see Image 1]; you should find only the work path you just created. In the bottom right of the Paths window is a button called "Stroke Path With Brush"--I click it and my land is outlined in tiles. Neato! [Again, see Image 1] (And if anything goes wrong, don't forget Edit>Undo is your friend!)
6. Now I'll fill my land. First, I drag the work path to the "Create New Path" button to save that original path (just in case). Then with this copied path selected, I...
- Click the "Load Path As Selection" button, so the ants march once again around the land.
- Then I Select>Modify>Contract that selection by just over 2/3 the width of the tiles I'm using. I'm stroking with 15 px tiles, so I contract by 11.
- Now I follow the same process as above: click the Marquee Tool, right click inside the selection & choose "Make Work Path", then select my tile brush, and finally click the "Stroke Path With Brush". A second row of tiles shows up inside the first. [See Image 2]
7. I'll keep doing this same process over and over again until my entire land area is filled with tiles.
Now, this repetition could (as I'm sure you can tell) get very tedious, so I created an Action to do this exact function. If you've never used Actions, they are basically ways of "recording" your steps so you can "play them back" as many times as you wish, repeating a long series of steps in a single click. So using my tiling Action about a dozen times took about 15 seconds and filled in all the land. Look at the third image I've attached and you can see the action window: I recorded the process of tiling, selecting, contracting, making a path...so with the push of a button it was all done for me! Very handy. (Plus, now that I've saved it I can repeat this process on any map at any time in the future!)
8. My final step is to fill in the larger gaps left by my automated process. I simply "dab" the tiles in where needed--sometimes even adjusting the size to a smaller px to fit with as little overlap as possible. Oh, and a useful trick I recently learned: click in one place then hold down Shift and click somewhere else and PS will draw a straight line between the two; very useful for longer rows of straight-line tile fill!
NEXT UP: Ocean (a circular tile fill. Oooooohhhhh!)
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