Seeking Information - Town Map Creation & Gimp

[Creek]

Hi I'm interested in the creation regional and town maps. I've been planning a campaign and doing a some hand drawn stuff and decided to do some research on software I could use.

A quick search let me to Pro Fantasy software. Exactly what I was looking for and a lot more than I would ever need. Much too expensive, the software for me to create a regional map and the software to create a town map are two separate purchases.

My next thought was Photoshop. I haven't used the program of owned it in many years. I downloaded GIMP and I will be reading tutorials and experimenting in the weeks to come. There is a really good regional map tutorial on this website I found. Currently I am focused on my town map.

A few notes about my maps, the regional is very small in scale a secluded island. My town is also very small community low population.

Questions

1. I have a touch screen monitor with a kind of pen or stylus can I utilize the touch screen monitor to 'hand draw' buildings in GIMP?

2. What are some tools used for placing structures and vegetation I don't intended to hand draw?

3. Are there any GIMP tutorials you are aware of that specifically focus on the town map creation?

[RobA]

Ho Creek!

To answer your questions:

1) Yes, but if your touch/screen stylus does not act like a digitizer (pressure sensitivity) it will only act like a mouse (i.e. when you drag, it will draw) without the extra features like changing width based on pressure or pen tilt.

2) You can either drop in images as new layers in Gimp and build a map up that way, or create/use a gimp brush or animated brush (hose) to "stamp" down structures or vegetation.

3) Not many, but you can find a few through search, and it depends on the style of map you hope to make:

http://www.cartographersguild.com/tu...easy-gimp.html
http://www.cartographersguild.com/tu...owns-gimp.html

or a few in Photoshop that can be used as rough guides with pretty good success:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/tu...-tutorial.html
http://www.cartographersguild.com/tu...photoshop.html
http://www.cartographersguild.com/tu...-gullside.html

-Rob A>