[WIP] Antillia: Island for RPG campaign

[tolcreator]

Been lurking a while, only posted a few things so far. Been drawing maps away myself for a good while but deciding to get my teeth really into this one.
I changed machines while drawing this map, and some of my old brushes were lost in the transition. I'm using this as an excuse to get more ambitious.
I'm using GIMP. Full map is 5088 x 3708.

Step 1)
Copy a load of bits of the real world, and paste them as layers. Move them around, flip them, rotate them, etc, until they look nice.
topo.png

Step 2)
Now in the old version what I would do was select the transparent area, invert, fill the land, grow by one, fill the coast, select the land, and cut that from the coast giving the coastline.
land.png

This gave a very jagged coastline when you zoom in (to 100% here):
zoom1.png

The new method is to instead select with feathered edges, then do selection to path, then do stroke path for the coast. For the land fill, do path to selection and do bucket fill. This gives a smother coastline, which does loose some detail, but I probably had too much bitty detail before:
zoom2.png

This is where I get a little fancy. I did repeated "select from path, grow by 6, path from selection, stroke path", with ever lighter strokes, to give a ripple effect on the water. Then I stole the parchment texture from Fantastic Maps | Maps of real and fantasy worlds. Using my coastal path, I cut a land and sea from it. I coloured the sea a little blue, made them both a bit transparent. I made my ripples a bit transparent and blurred them up a bit. Here's the result!
zoom3.png