Cutting out Mali from a map of Africa

This can be adapted to cutting out any country from any Continent

  1. Find a map. To avoid copyright infringement use the Creative Commons Search tool
  2. Load GIMP and load the map
    3. map-africa101 (14K)

    GRAB THE COUNTRY OUTLINE

  3. Select contiguous regions tool and see if you can select just the country you want by clicking inside it
  4. Zoom in and repair the border if there are small gaps in it causing "leakage" with the select tool. Use the eye dropper for colour and pencil set to 1px circle
    5. borderGaps (10K)

    Before: Gaps in the border

    gapsRepair (6K)

    After: Gaps repaired

  5. Try again, select one country using the contiguous regions tool
  6. Copy selection
  7. File > New > Create a New Image
  8. Paste selection
  9. Choose the background map colour (eyedropper tool) and use a thick pencil or paintbrush to fill in any gaps in the pasted selection in the new file. For example, there will be gaps where the name of the country was.

    10. ADD A BORDER

  10. Choose a border colour (eye dropper tool) from the original map
  11. Select the country outline using the contiguous regions tool or select by colour also works
    12. selected (9K)
  12. Edit > Stroke selection 1px line width, creates a nice border
    13. border (6K)

    ADD NAME AND EXTRAS

  13. Cut and paste name and lakes from original large map to individual country. If lakes cross over the border you may have to do some fiddly manual work with the eyedropper and pencil to get the lake and border in the correct positions
    14. mali (6K)
  14. Save as a gif, you have finished one African country. One down, 53 to go!

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.