Creating a natural forest border?

[Wydrah]

I want to create a natural forest, but it's really difficult to do that without a good tree autotile. Observe:

The canopy autotile is really lame, but it's the only option I know of to create a non-rectangular tree border.


I made this image to help de-emphasize the fact that almost all my tree borders are straight:



Pictures of it in game:

Spoiler

I'm not fully satisfied with it, though. I just feel like I'm hiding a terrible flaw instead of correcting it. Does anyone have any advice about how to create a more natural forest border?

 

[Zekallinos]

In real natural forest, there are no borders at all, since all tree are at a relatively equal distance from each other. Instead of making big map borders, have some smaller chunks of canopy in the middle.

But working with 2D pixel graphics, you need to find a style that looks good with the graphics you are using, not try to imitate real life (it's going to get closer to the uncanny valley).

The canopy doesn't look that bad. But if you have a big chunk of canopy, then a big chunk of grass, it's really going to accentuate it, thus making it look awkward. So first thing you should worry about : making the rest of the map look good, by at least faking some diversity/asymetry. That doesn't mean putting obstacle all over the place - but try to have some more floor diversity.

A good thing you can do is copy cliffs from another tileset. Forest are rarely totally flat, so having height slight variations can make things much better.

And unless it's supposed to be a really evil and dark forest, don't obstruct the player's view like that.