Hello Everyone!

[Santra]

I saw one of the tutorials stating it was a tutorial for artistically challenged. I realized, that's gotta be me. I get very inspired by things, spend hours upon hours working on something I thought about only to come up with a stick man figure. I'm hoping other tutorials also could provide help for my condition of really really wanting to do cool looking stuff without any real vision on what actually would be looking good.

So why did I look this forum up in the first place? About a month a go I got into D&D table top RPG and now my poor friends have to endure all sorts of trouble by me being the game master in my "I made it all by my self ( and it shows) world". Then I thought about showing them how I imagined the world to look at. I did this with.. (can you guess?) Paint. Yep, didn't really look that good. I think self censorship took over and I destroyed everything I made. My next step was to download paint.net if they have more tools to use. Those maps I still have, but they didn't look that great either.

One of my friends intervened and said he will do the map for me. He downloaded GIMP (never used it before) and after few days of cursing made a really really good looking map. I had this thought that GIMP is going to be impossibly hard for mere mortals to use. With help and encouragements, I was able to download GIMP and start my own map.

I wanted to join the guild to get maybe some feedback and suggestions on the maps I make and to be able to comment on the threads when I have a question is another good reason. There is however some sort of excitement with me about maps in general, especially old looking ones. I once sat in a bookstore looking at old world maps and was thinking how much courage those people must have needed to wander off from the charted territories to discover something new.

So yeah, this is my introduction and I'm glad to be here.

[Ryusamasan]

Good to have ya!
Take a glance at your cities main public library... They often have great collections of books with old maps, ones that don't leave the library...

[Santra]

Oh, didn't thought of that. Thank you for the tip.

[ChickPea]

Hi Santra, and welcome to the Guild!

Paint's not the greatest program for mapping, and I think you'll do much better with Gimp, once you get used to it. It sounds like you've already had a look in the Tutorials section, but I highly recommend trying out a few more tutorials, even if they aren't exactly what you want to achieve. It's difficult to learn a whole new software application all at once, so anything that gets you practising is worthwhile, and you always learn something new from every tutorial. Best advice is to just keep working at it, and I promise that you will get better, and you can banish those stick men drawings forever!

Have a look in this thread and this one to see if anything appeals. Good luck!

[Santra]

Thank you. There is so many tutorials and so many styles I could try out that it's almost hard to choose what to test next. =)