[Award Winner ] Creating an old-school map in Gimp.

[torstan]

In this post we'll do the following:
1. Add a new layer
2. Set up a brush of the right colour and size
3. Turn on snap to grid
4. Lay down the walls with the brush tool.

Right, now that we have out pretty graph paper, either made using my natty pattern files or through Rob's much easier method above (there's always a quicker way to do it ), we need to start laying down walls. I'm going to do a dungeon, so we are underground - this is a classic mapping tutorial after all, we should start with a dungeon.

Now it will be useful to make use of layers at this stage. The graph paper will be our background but we don't want to erase the graph if we make a mistake. Therefore we will do our drawing on a separate layer. To do this, make sure the layers dialogue is up - either by going to Dialogs->Layers, or ctrl-L. Now you'll see a thumbnail of your pretty graph paper called background. To create a new layer, hit the new layer button:


This brings up a New Layer dialogue. In here, give the layer a name (I'll call mine Walls) and select the fill type to be transparency. This means we can draw on this layer, but be able to see everything that has been drawn on layers further down the stack.

Right, with this layer selected, we want to draw some walls. First we want to have the walls in the same lovely blue as the rest. In the toolbox there are two blocks of colour, one is the foreground colour and the other is the background colour. You want to change the foreground colour as this is the one that all the tools use to draw with:


If you double click on the foreground colour box, you can change this. In this case I am using a blue with the code: 18769d If you enter this into the text field, you will have this colour too!


Now we want the tools to snap to the grid we set up. Go to View->Snap to Grid and make sure it is checked. Now select the paintbrush tool and pick a brush size of 3px circle:


Now pick a place to start drawing a wall and click once on a grid intersection. Now this will just make a single small circle appear. Now press shift and move the mouse to where you want the wall to go. You'll see a line connecting your current mouse position to that first dot. This is the line along which the 3px line will be painted. Move the mouse to the grid point where you want this section of wall to end and click again. A nic straight wall should appear. If you keep holding shift down and move the mouse again you can extend the wall further. This way it is very quick to lay down an outline of a dungeon that will look something like this: