Greek Style Map

[ChickPea]

For the dirt, I'd just pick a grungy brush and try a dark brown or black colour with the layer blend set to Multiply. Just start painting around and see how it looks.

I think individual paving stones would look much better, and you could paint some dirt in the cracks between and maybe have it edging out from the cracks onto the stones.

I hope it wasn't a huge amount of work to create the mosaic effect (I didn't have time to read through the tutorial in detail, but it looked complicated!) Still, it's always easier and faster once you know what you're doing.

The only other suggestion I have, and this is entirely a personal taste thing, would be to desaturate the colours just a little. I'm not sure what overall effect you're going for, but I kinda feel that if it's a rather dirty mosaic floor pattern, then the colours might be a little muted and faded, whereas yours are quite bright and vivid. However, that's perhaps exactly what you want, in which disregard this suggestion!

[Adam_Kadmon]

Laying down the tiles to create the mosaic effect was actually quite quick. Once you have set up your brush correctly, you create a work path, stroke the path, then shrink the path and repeat. Once you have set it up as an action you can lay down thousands of tiles in a matter of minutes. It's well worth reading pyrandon's tutorial just to learn the method. It's not that complicated. Somebody else translated it into Gimp, but I didn't read that part.

Using a layer blend set to Multiply to do the dirt sounds like a good idea. I was using a layer mask for some reason.

The tiles are quite glossy and vivid. They are glazed tiles, and I suspect they keep their colour quite well, but I'll have to do some research about ancient mosaics and see how they age.

Thanks for the feedback.