Tree patterns

[Chgowiz]

Wow, it's been a long time since I've had that feeling of nervousness asking a question - not since the crusty days of posting questions to Usenet...

I've been following along the Zombie Nirvana videos and applying what I've learned to my map. One of the issues I've run into is the use and cleaning up of the forest patterns.

The way I end up doing the forest pattern, there ends up being a lot of trees that overlap. That makes a nice natural look (to me) and also adds a kind of 'side' (is that the right term?) view to the map, much like the mountains that Haphestet's tutorial shows.

When I'm 'cleaning up' the edges of the forest, what happens is I get these jagged areas that are caused by the overlap and erasing part of the tree that causes the overlap. The area isn't 'smooth' to my view. I always imagine that if someone hand draws a map, their forest edges are probably going to have a natural curve, but these jagged areas don't lend themselves to that.

I should add that I think that my drawing has gotten a lot better in the past two weeks, as have my forest patterns, but I'm still having the same problem with the jagged edges even with better looking patterns.

I've come up with a way of solving this, but I don't know if I'm missing a step or technique that perhaps I'm overcompensating for with my solution. Am I doing something wrong or is this something everyone just deals with in their own way?

Thanks.
Neurowiz