Hello there!

So, I'm basically a map enthusiast and recently decided to try to take it a step further and try to learn how to do some neat maps myself instead of only drooling over awesome pieces of art of other people.

Before I start with the map discussion per se, I guess I should say I never worked or played with any kind of image processing software like GIMP or PS and I'm quite challenged at drawing anything hand-free, so yeah... I'm a complete and utter green nooblet.

What I did to start was read all "basic" tutorials I could find with a style that I liked and from there, along with some google-fu, try to follow it and get something to come to fruition!

After reading the awesome tutorials of Ascension and "Hand-drawn Map Tutorial" by Gidde, I decided to follow the second since it's a style I like a lot and proceed to download GIMP and get on with it.

So, after around 10hs of playing with the tutorial and slamming my head against GIMP, I concluded a "frankstein map" of sorts but I had some problems during the process, and I'd like some help so I could iron those out so in my next try I can eliminate those and try to achieve something closer to the map shown by Gidde as example in his tutorial.

The problems I could identify:

1 - After doing all the Mountains/Hills/Forest/... layers and their respective shadings, merging them and getting to the step where the Tutorial says to merge all them I got a problem where my mountains and hill were somehow only showing when I had the Background active (With the eye on). Why did this happend and how do I make it not happen? As I understand I should have all these individual layers with their respective aspects (mountains, hill, forests, swamps...) with a transparent background, so that I can later put them on top of my modified/texturized background, right?

2- The Tutorial keeps refering to a "Fuzzy brush" but there's no brush named fuzzy or with a description as well...so I figured It had to do probably with version difference and tried to go with a brush that resembled the fuzzy effect, with a more solid center and fading out board...is that the correct thing or is there in fact a "fuzzy brush" that I should dl or something?

3 - The rivers part. The Tutorial says to DL a script and all that jazz, but I saw I could create a new dynamic to my brushes that could make a "Fade > Size" that would basically do the same trick to the line I draw, starting big and going thinner along the drawing...is it ok to do it like that or is there some other "correct" way of doing Rivers I should be using?

4 - Paths... When I got to the Labeling, I tried using the Path tool to mark 2 anchors, curve it how I like and than add Text and than Text Along Path. I encountered 2 main problems, sometimes the text would go to the path shape, but at the end I would get my selection running very, very far out of the screen, like as if it was pinned completely out of the picture and most of the time, specially when I tried using paths with a "S" shape or something more fancy than a simple curve, the Text would not be correctly shaped or would get "funky" starting in the correct shape and ending halfway through the Path shape and stuff like that. Am I using Path wrongly here? Is there a Tutorial I could use to eliminate these?

5 - Border...How do I cut the border correctly so that at the end I get a nice image with borders correctly limiting the picture outer endings instead of what I got that where there's background outwards the border?

6 - Text...doesn't seem completely readable...how do I improve that?

So, these are the biggest problems I could identify myself. If you guys could, please, help me with those and any other you might find, I'd be extremely thankful. Also would like to thank the Tutorial authors, since even though my map is looking ugly, considering I never ever even opened GIMP before I guess they made a miracle.

There's the frankstein map! ^_^
http://i.imgur.com/gsbduoN.jpg