Eriam - or "How I'm about to stop being a map hacker and learn to love the Gimp"

[Lukc]

Welcome and viel Glück!

[Tobin Butler]

Thanks!/Danke!

I'm planning on recording most of what I do, primarily so that those who choose to offer assistance to me will know what I did for troubleshooting purposes, and also so that those who are less familiar with the tools might benefit from my trial and error.

In order to do arsheesh's advanced tutorial, I find it necessary to do RobA's tutorial as well...



Most of these actions were called for by RobA's tutorial (http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...rnative-method)...

1. In Gimp, I cut down the size of the map I want to recreate to make it a little easier to work with by using the rectangle selector tool to outline the area I wanted to work with and then selecting ">Image>Crop to selection" from the toolbar.
2. This left me with a pretty small image, so I increased the size of the image using ">image>scale image". Because I'm trying to recreate a particular map, I wanted to link the height/width proportions by clicking on the little chain icon next to the height and width entry boxes. I didn't worry about how poorly the image was going to scale up, because it was only a template for later work.
3. I tried to use the select by color tool to outline the continents, but the paper the original map was on had too much noise to be very specific about what the tool was grabbing. After saving the cut-down map, I used the eraser tool to erase the interiors of the areas I wanted to work with. (Hardness 100, several different brush sizes). After erasing everything inside of the borders, I was able to outline the continents with the color select tool.
4. I created a new transparent layer by right clicking on the layers box (top right hand box, layers tab) and selecting ">new layer". I named the new layer "land mask" and selected the transparent radio button.
5. I selected the land mask layer, then the bucket fill tool. I double clicked the foreground color box and selected white, and then filled the continent outlines with white. I deselected the continent outline, changed the foreground color to black, and then filled in the remaining areas.