I could use a little advice.

[Ramah]

Hey there.

When I was looking into using a multi-tree brush on my map, I found one good way to do it was to stagger the edges of the brush. I'll try to post an example up when I get some time in a while but basically, you make your new image, fill it with your tree brushes but at the edges alternate between a tree and a tree-sized gap. That way, when you lay out your forests you just lay the pieces like a jigsaw. It's obviously not as fast as filling a selection with a seamless pattern but it does allow for a little more variation to fool the eye by placing the pieces staggered and maybe leaving some little clearings. Then just go around the edge of the forest and place some individual trees to mask the fact it is done in squares and voila, a nice forest.

No need for feathering to try and mask that it is a pattern and chop trees in half in the process.

EDIT:

Ok, I very quickly added some examples. They aren't perfect but I didn't spend very long on them at all. With a little more care and attention then better results can be achieved.

The first image is a quick brush I whipped up from about half a dozen smaller brushes. I added a little shading in between which looks very rough but at smaller sizes the roughness disappears anyway.



I then sketched out a very, very quick forest with this brush. It took me about 10 seconds or so. The brush isn't perfect so there is overlapping in places but that can be fixed with more care spent over the original brush and with placement. I also added some single trees around the edge with one of the brushes I used to make the main forest brush.


As you can see, it can look very effective with minimal effort. At least I think so. Certainly you have more control than over a seamless pattern.