The mountains... always the mountains.

[alexandream]

Hello, everyone. This is my first post regarding anything I've created

Anyways, I've been experimenting with quite a few different techniques (for quite a while now) to create Mountain Ranges in a kind of realistic fashion.

Problem is, I'm pretty much incapable of accomplishing it

So far I got the image at the bottom to work as the base relief, but it still has a lot to be made so that I can actually like it. So I decided to post it here to see if you guys have better ideas than I do.

First what I don't like about this, and questions I would like to ask you guys:

1) I want to create a mountain range, and it kinda looks like this one only has a single mountain crest going on. I've yet to experiment on duplicating (or triplicating, perhaps) the technique used to make this crest to come with somewhat-parallel crests, more broken, and make the middle ones stand taller than the peripheral ones. Do you think this idea holds any promise?

2) So far, it looks too big! I'm not sure about the real geography measures for mountain ranges are but, so far, with the single crest, this thing is getting around 13 Km (almost 10 miles) from one side of the range to the other. Is this a reasonable "width" for a mountain range in the scale of, highest peaks, around 2 or 3 miles high? The scale used in this map is of 1px : 200m, or 8px : 1 mile.

3) I can't texturize it properly, no matter what I do. What would you guys consider a good technique for (in GIMP) making a nice rocky texture for those mountains?

Well, that's all for now, I guess. And all in all, please don't limit yourselves to the questions pointed out above.... all criticism and suggestions are welcome!

Oh, and I'm using GIMP for it, although I can have access to Photoshop CS2, though I don't own a copy for it, so it's rarer: I use it at my brother's place some times.

Regards,
Alexandre.