My first attempts at continent building with GIMP

[Diamond]

1. Welcome to the Guild!
2. Good start so far; interesting layout.
3. What do you mean by shadowing the islands?
4. As far as positioning geographical features, it depends on how in-depth you want to get. There are people here who start from planetary formation and walk it through tectonic formation, climate, planetary mass and 5 billion other statistics. If that's not your cup of tea, my best suggestion is to look at real-world geography and find out why it looks that way. I always start with mountain placement, since that will (for the most part) dictate where everything else goes.

[AtlasNerd]

1 & 2. Thank you. I originally tired using Inkarnate but the it was too low-res for a continent-sized map. I started with a quick sketch of landmasses when I was bored at work. I took a picture with my phone, uploaded it my computer, then cut the shapes of the landmasses in GIMP and tweaked the coastlines using a tutorial I found on this site.
3. I want to add shadows to the outlines of the islands. They look too flat against the ocean background.
4. I have a vague idea of the geographical layout(city placement, grasslands, forests). I know where I'll put the mountain ranges. From there, I think I'll start to add lakes and rivers, which may change the placement of towns, villages, and cities. which in turn will impact the story.
5. Thank you for responding

[AtlasNerd]

I'm a little stuck on rendering mountains, I can't seem to find any decent brushes for GIMP.

[AtlasNerd]

Many thanks to Roba and Candacis for their tutorials and I got the awesome Compass Rose from Josiah VE. The mountains are ok, but I'd like to try another technique to really get them where I would like them(quality wise) I still to add the names of cities, towns, geographic features, etc.