Mixing hand drawn and randomly generated elements?

[Sigurd]

Looks great.

I think one can obsess about making each step perfect. Try going further with it and see if anything really causes you any problems. If you work digitally, esp. in layers, you can always go back.

Sigurd

[Midgardsormr]

Some of your coastlines are definitely more fractalized than others. I'm not sure I would have noticed except that you drew our attention to it, though. Have you checked the "Semi-Random Coastlines" tutorial? That one allows more control over just how random a coastline gets--you get to control the shape of the continents, and the level of blur you apply determines how "fractaly" the coast becomes.

As for your northern continent's proximity to the other, you could just lasso select one of them and move it a little further away. I'm not sure the procedure in the Gimp, but in Photoshop it's pretty straightforward.

[Aristotle]

My experiments with the tutorials lead to fairly uniformly fractalized maps. I think my goal, or at least my goal once I got started, was to create less uniformity by breaking up a few coasts severely and leaving others clean. My concern is that the clean coasts are too clean...

I'll experiment with pressing more fractalized bits around the edges, so that I can continue to make some portions more broken up than others, but I think I should probably also heed the "don't obsess over every detail of something so large" warning for now too. I can always perform minor edits of coasts, islands, and lakes as I focus on individual regions.