The Circle Sea

[CAgrippa]

I've been working my way through RobA's scintillating GIMP tutorial, learning a great deal very fast. My current effort looks like this:

A few things have given me headaches (not including actual mistakes, I mean).

1. I can't get those boreal pine forests down south to look decent. Actually, the trees in general look to me pretty shabby.

2. I'm not at all happy about the snowcaps on the mountains. The colors don't seem right to me, for a start, and they seem delightfully etched... in the wrong ways. I wonder if the latter could be solved by some kind of embossing technique? As to the former, I don't know where I'm going wrong.

Any comments, suggestions, or whatever are much appreciated.

(Yes, I know I don't have any manmade features as yet, nor labels.)

[Daridian]

1. I can't get those boreal pine forests down south to look decent. Actually, the trees in general look to me pretty shabby.

I had a very similar problem when using the RobA's tutorial, the trees never pleased me. I eventually went to other tutorials to see if using them (on top of a basic map created using RobA's method) would work. So far, http://www.cartographersguild.com/tu...-mini-tut.html, this one looks the best and makes it incredibly easy to change the colors of the forest so you can show different types of trees.

2. I'm not at all happy about the snowcaps on the mountains. The colors don't seem right to me, for a start, and they seem delightfully etched... in the wrong ways. I wonder if the latter could be solved by some kind of embossing technique? As to the former, I don't know where I'm going wrong.

Same thing with the mountains, they never looked right. I would generally start by using RobA's "simple mountains in gimp" tutorial and then tweaking the layers until I got something that looked pleasing. I am still trying to find another tutorial for that one.


All in all, I like the start of your map, good luck with it in the future.