Two years ago I made a pretty decent looking map for Kaendor in Krita and GIMP. I was actually quite surprised that it was that long ago, as I had been used to my maps constantly changing and being revised. But the overall layout and the important settlements really have not changed at all since then. Which I take to be a sign that the setting has settled into a stable state that I am more or less happy with, even in the long term. I still have not finished naming everything, but I think I’ll be getting there over this year.
Today, I made a new version of that old map, in one afternoon trying out Inkarnate for the first time. This still could use some more polish, but I really quite like how it looks overall.
I still think this actually looks too clean and pristine as a handout for a Bronze Age Sword & Sorcery setting, though. I might end up tracing the final map in Krita to give it a more scribbled and grimy look.
Curious why you switch between krita and gimp. What does krita do that you can’t already do in gimp?
I used GIMP to stitch together fragments of real maps that show interesting coastlines, since real coastlines almost always look realistic when you draw them, while free hand drawn coastlines can easily look off. Maybe you could do that in Krita, but I always found it easier to just do it in GIMP like I always did, and then export that stitched together map as a jpg.
I then load the jpg as the background layer in Krita and trace the coastlines by hand with a graphics tablet. You can of course do this in GIMP as well, which I did with many of my older maps. But Krita is designed to work with pressure sensitive pens to make thicker or thinner lines, and the way it puts down paint on the layers just looks so much smoother and overall better. Krita is intended to simulate liquid paint, while GIMP is more for manipulating existing images. And for maps that look like they were hand painted in ink, Krita just looks much better in my opinion. And it’s just a lot of fun to paint in Krita with a graphics tablet, simply because the way it shows you the feedback on the screen.
Edit: Completely forgot about the main reason to use GIMP. It’s much easier to add map icons and text to a map that wayy.