I am trying desperately to create a map for a story/world I am creating. Basically it is !VERY SIMPLE!: I need to create a large mountain range which separates this one particular area from the rest of the planet. The area has to have enough rivers, lakes, and forests for there to be separate rival Duchies. Each Duchy would be maybe 100x100 miles, and there'd be maybe 5 such Duchies. The total area would be maybe 1,500 x 1,000 miles.

I was making the map in MSPaint, but came into too many problems. I have been trying to use Paint.Net and GIMP now, but I keep running into the same problem.

Layers.

When I select "Create New Layer" nothing happens. I have no indication that the layer was actually created, and if it was, no way to know which layer I am working with. To top things off, GIMP has a crappy color system; you have to create all your own colors. MSPaint at least had a preset pallete. And Paint.Net has the same thing, but I'm not so sure it's layers system even WORKS at all.

It's so simple to do, yet, I keep running into so many problems. I've bene at this for two weeks with almost nothing to show for it except this:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...ve/maptry4.gif

Which I think totally SUCKS. After looking at even a "novice" map, my own map is put to shame. And after I spent three days on it! And it's not even what I need, it's total crap for my project.

I like how I do my forests. I even like how I did my mountains, although they SUCK.

Do you guys have any suggestions? I'm about to give up and delete everything, even my story notes, just because I can't get the damned map just right!

See I don't even want to do anything COMPLICATED. No fancy shading effects or shadows and all that. Just a very clean, but nice map, maybe even just ONE layer but with transparent text. But I can't even figure that out.