[WIP] My first map, Kingdom of St Samuel

[Chashio]

It is nicer with the jagged coastlines, and no dirt. Did you intend for the deeper islands to have black sand around their edges? Just pointing out that it's different from the rest of the map, not necessarily bad. Um, your mountains... =) haha (as a last resort, you could try inverting the layer). I'm not sure what style/process the tutorial follows, but you could always draw them by hand, too, with various brush-style settings. That's my habit, but it's not to everyone's liking.

[Holdenburg]

It is nicer with the jagged coastlines, and no dirt. Did you intend for the deeper islands to have black sand around their edges? Just pointing out that it's different from the rest of the map, not necessarily bad. Um, your mountains... =) haha (as a last resort, you could try inverting the layer). I'm not sure what style/process the tutorial follows, but you could always draw them by hand, too, with various brush-style settings. That's my habit, but it's not to everyone's liking.

Yes, I much prefer the jagged coastline an no dirt. I don't know what happened with the black beaches, I guess the residents will just have to put up with black volcanic sand beaches like Tenerife! I'm gonna have another go at mountains today, I was toying with the idea of cutting and pasting mountains onto the map.

[Chashio]

Wow. That's confusing... might try it myself and see how it works. I avoid channels like the plague but, I never really understood them.

My coastal mask system: When I create my coastlines, I magic wand the water (still just lines on a transparent layer) and inverse my selection (cuts down on choosing individual islands), make a new layer (name it land mass), fill my selection with a color, deselect, and reduce the opacity so it doesn't mess with my color-picking, and put it near the bottom of the layer list. My coastline and river and mountain layers, etc, go near the top, and any 'background painting' like watercolor, goes just above my paper layer. So when I need to paint on just the land or water, I click to my land mass layer and magic wand the one I want to paint on, click back to my painting layer and have at it. (there's probably a much easier way to do it, but it works

How I would paint the water two-toned like that is make two solid fill layers, select my land mass (like above) and for both of the fill layers, cut the land section away so it's just blue on the water (or opposite, select water area then fill). Then click to the top of the two layers and use the erase tool on varying opacity to get the effect I want. When that's done, I usually adjust those layer opacity, or change the layer styles, so that the paper texture shows through and it looks more like watercolor.

Just another way to go about it. =) I look forward to your mountains. Cutting and pasting is basically the same as making a brush for it. That works too.

[jfrazierjr]

Wow. That's confusing... might try it myself and see how it works. I avoid channels like the plague but, I never really understood them.

RUN, don't walk to the tutorial in my sig.. It's really simplistic, but will give you the basics. If you want something a big more in depth, you can search for threads started by me and "some creek thing"(I think that's the name of it) which has several videos(not great quality though and no voice) that walk through some of the steps as it's being done. That probably should have been in the tutorials forum, but it's not for some reason... I have actually thought about remaking the videos now that GIMP 2.8 is out, but just have not gotten the time yet.

[Chashio]

@jfrazierjr Thanks, I'll check those out... and the ISO mountains been playing with that, too.

[Holdenburg]

I have created a political map for my Kingdom, showing the Provinces and Emirates.



I tried and failed big time with the mountains and was kindly helped by waldronate, who did the mountains for me. I'm very happy with his work.



Next up, rivers.

[Chashio]

Cool shields. =D I might have to make some of those for myself. The mountains look nice too; did he follow the tutorial or just do them his own way?