My Thracioth map walk-thru (Photoshop)

[pyrandon]

STEP FOUR: WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE... (pt. 1)

Next let's add the water. Were I just creating a "standard" map, without any sort of fancy-schmancy frame (or if I were intending to just add a simple frame later in the process), I would just select a color & fill with the paintbucket tool. But my map frame has that curved top, so I want to select that area to fill first.

The first attachment, below, shows an instructional image. It's easy:
1. With the Elliptical Marquee Tool, I drew an ellipse with a top half matching my frame's arc.
2. Then I clicked the "add to selection" option
3. Finally, I switched to the Rectangular Marquee Tool & drew out the straight edges of the frame. After I was done, the entire frame was selected as a solid area. (Cue the "Oooooohhs!")

Leaving the ants marching around the selected area, I create a "Water Base Color" layer below the Land layer; then I used the paintbucket tool to fill the selection with my dominant water color.

Before deselcting the ants, I created a new layer on top called "Map Frame" & Edit>Stroke the selection in black, with a 5 px. line. This is for later use.

Then I Select>Deselect to get rid of the ants. (see image below)