When I started making boards I was using the nice 64 pixel by 64 pixel board elements that I found on Erik Floderus's site. They were very nice graphics, but the opaque, squarish nature of them made it hard to overlay elements and ruled out a lot of legal arrangments without having to resort to hand editing. For instance if one wanted a square that had a crusher and was at the bottom of a ledge and was filled with radio-active fog, it just couldn't be done easily.

To remedy that I took all of the .gif format graphics and moved them into .xcf format (the native format of the gimp). By doing so and by making sure I was using the gimp's layering and alpha channel features to their fullest I was able to make a very flexible board creation environment. Below I'll track the creation of a square which, as described above, has a crusher, is at the bottom of a ledge, and is filled with radio-active fog. The below process should work almost identically in PhotoShop, but someone will have to make .psd files out of the .xcf files I made.

1. Open blankboard.xcf file and create layers for each type of component one wishes to use. In this case we'll make three layers called Crushers, Radioactive, and Ledges. For now we won't worry about the ordering of the layers.

2. First let's add the crusher. To do so open the crusher.xcf file and bring it up in the Layers dialog. Make only the layers for the crusher itself and the phase numbers desired visible. We'll (quickly!) make this one a 3 5 crusher.

3. Once only the desired layers are selected select 'Merge Visible Layers' from the Layers menu. Use [Ctrl] + A to select everything in the crusher.xvf window. Using the Image: drop down menu in the Layers dialog, select blankboard.xcf. Click on the Crushers layer. You can now paste the crusher into the desired square. Go ahead and close (but not save) crusher.xcf; we're done with it.

4. Notice how I placed the crusher up and to the right so as to leave room for the edges of the ledge -- another thing not terribly easily done when your non-transparent crushers come already sitting on a square. The next element to add is the edge of the ledge. Ledges are in ledge.xcf which uses layers to allow you to select how many sides of the square have an altitude change.

Select the desired ledges (I decided to make mine two ledges at a right angle), merge the visible layers, and copy the result to the clipboard. Unlike the crusher we'll want to rotate this one. That can be easily done using the rotate feature of the transform tool. Paste the image onto the Ledges layer, but don't anchor it. Then use the transform tool to rotate it. Switch back to the move tool to position it, and then anchor it. Make sure that you turn Smoothing off in the tranform tool options or the image will get blurry when rotating. Notice how the partial transparency allows the ledge object to cast a correctly tinted shadow. Snazzy!

5. All that's left to add is the radioactive fog. The fog along with a few other objects, is in the radioactive.xcf file. Make the fog itself the select layer and the copy the fog to the Radioactive layer of the blank board. Once the fog as been added one can easily change the z-order of the components. If, for instance, it is decided that having the ledges tinted by the readioactive fog is undesirable the layer with the ledes can be un-tinted rapidly by moving it above the layer with the fog. I've found that it's best to keep the grid layer above all layers except the edges. I forgot to do it in this example and you can see the black lines of the grid cutting across the ends of the ledge. That tends to ruin the 3d look of the ledge if you have multiple ledge segments connected.

6. After the board has been finished it can be flattened and exported to .tiff for printing or .gif for posting on the net. Notice how making that square was possible without ever using the paint tool or even the selection tool! In fact, my board The Sampler Pack was made using the gimp and the only free hand drawing I had to do was the oil for the oilslick.