Okay, I think I've finally got it.

I was pretty much despairing with Gradients, it just wasn't working at all.

So I finally thought I'd better try ThunderStone's idea of shrinking the selection and filling with ever darker colours.

It doesn't work without a bit of tweaking, because of those bar remnants that go across the dips - what originally formed the handles to lift the cover before they rusted away - so I had to paint some of the graded colours by hand, the ends nearest the bars.

Plus when you blur, you get dark lines around the edges of the dips, these had to be painted out too, and yet a faint ridge remains, causing that odd glitch you see in the brown half of the image above, but compared with the others this is a much better effort - especially when the texture is added.

What I'm wondering now is how do you do a decent pebbly sand?

Preferably without having to paint every - single - pebble!!!???

Measure your mind's height
by the shade it casts.
Robert Browning (Paracelsus)

Fran's Freestuff

http://franontheedge.blogspot.com/

http://www.FranOnTheEdge.com