Lu Arla - Fantasy Continent Map

[ChrisClark13]

New guy here! Got brought in by all the wonderful tutorials lying around mostly.

So I was following through the Eriond tutorial, making tweaks here and there, and I ended up with this after messing about with details (mostly in Wilbur) for about a week to find a process I liked.

I followed the tutorial up to the part where the mountains are made and then I diverged a bit by having an overlay layer to do the elevation gradient with and making depressions for the lakes.

After I exported to Wilbur I messed around with the terrain to get a few lakes to fill just the areas I wanted just right then used the Fill > Compute Basin Deltas to get a height map for the lakes. (I also did a span of -100 to 3000 to keep the ocean below sea level [which is 0] so it wouldn't get rivers etched into it).
Then I undid that exported a height map for the general terrain before doing the next step.
First I filled the basins in with land using the Fill Basin filter and generated the rivers I wanted using some ridiculous settings with the Incise Flow filter (something like: Amount: 1000+, Flow Exponent: 5+, Effect Blur: 100+, and then Post Blur: 0.1 to make rivers downstream bigger than flow into it).
This utterly destroys everything else but etches some rivers nice and deep into the map, though before I exported I used the brush on the Maximum mode at a height of -70 to raise the rivers up from -1000 or lower so when I exported the greyscale height map it would turn out right.

I mostly followed the tutorial from there on, adding the rivers and the lakes into the River/Land mask, and used the gradients to color the land.
After I did that I went back and colored the water and oceans using the techniques from the "Using GIMP to Create an Artistic Regional RPG Map" tutorial with some airbrushing here and there.

I plan on adding in forests tomorrow using the "Photo-Realistic Forests in GIMP" tutorial.

If anyone wants the .xcf file I can upload it to Google Drive or Mediafire or something.

[arsheesh]

That's looking nice! I especially like the ocean. Look forward to keeping an eye on this.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[ChrisClark13]

Here's the progress I've made.

The forest was put into it's own group and then the whole group has the Hard Light effect on it and the borders are right now inner glow effects to not detract from the terrain too much but I might switch them out for just dotted lines.

Might go back and change the borders or go ahead and start labeling.

[ChrisClark13]

Ended up just tweaking the opacity of the layers before going straight into labeling the nations and capital/major cities since I had those worked out beforehand on a previous version of the map.

Now I'm thinking I'll either start labeling geographic features or add in stuff like a compass, a key, and/or a scale bar.

Though right now the map could technically be "done" since the info on it is pretty simple.

Any critiques?