I hope you folks will forgive a bit of thread necromancy here, but this particular subject is what got me on the hunt that led me to this site in the first place (through an entirely roundabout route).

I've loved S.John's map style since I first saw it on his site.. heck, I bought the book on strength of the maps alone. Unfortunately his tutorial on it is for Photoshop, and all I've got to work with is the GIMP.. and as far as I can tell the mode/bitmap trick he uses is one of the few things PS does that I can't get GIMP to duplicate. Help, please! If anyone out there knows how to replicate this in GIMP or Inkscape (I've recently picked it up and it shows promise, but I'm still an utter noob with it), please let me know.

I have had some luck with a layer fill set to dodge/burn, but while that gets the effect of the lines thinning out away from the coast, it doesn't bleed together at the coasts, so I wind up with a sharp edge between drawn out wedges of black.

Thanks for any help, and I'll be sure to post if I work it out for myself.