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