That's really great. What a wonderful effort :)

I know this is only a draft just yet, but if you want to soften the edges on those forests a bit and make them look a little less like a forestry plantation just dot a few single trees around the edges to break those hard lines up a bit. You don't need to go mad with it. Just a few will transform them and make it look like natural growth.

If you design a dashed line with the correct spacing and scale to use instead of a solid line it should be possible.

I think the black polygons with an Edge Fade Inner (or blur), followed by a blend mode of either overlay or multiply should be fine. It would be more controllable than other options because you can tweak the opacity on a sheet effect.

Use a black polygon.

When I'm not so busy I will have a look at making a small set of backgrounds, maybe as an annual issue, though it would have to be impressive enough to become that.

Hi Stephen :)

That's a very handy tutorial. Thanks for sharing.

You can attach pdfs and documents to comments in this forum as long as they aren't too large. It may be better to do that in this case so you don't have to maintain the link to your OneDrive into the future.

Time well spent. It's beautiful :)

That's the paragraph that gets most contact questions. I asked that one myself a while back before I became an employee. It's the bit of the EULA that really is down to the discretion of the owner of the rights, and which can't be answered by anyone else - not even me.

Well... Please don't laugh, because this actually seems to work for me 9 times out of 10

I'm sure this is anything BUT the official method, but what I do is click the point from where I want to start the tracing, then deliberately head off in the WRONG direction along the coast. This has the tendency to make the trace go off in the opposite direction (as I'm sure you will already have experienced), which if you have deliberately gone in the wrong direction to start with just happens to be the right direction.

Then just back up and carry on as if you haven't just had to trick it into going in the right direction

That looks like a great start wintermute :)

Have you tried viewing it with the sheet effects turned on? You can do that by checking the box called 'Activate Sheet Effects' at the top of the Sheets and Effects dialog. (You get this dialog by clicking the Sheets and Effects button|CC2SHEETS|on the left toolbar).

As you have mixed styles together I don't know what sheets and effects you have in this map, so it may not look as you want it to look straight away. However, with a little patience you can add, delete and edit the effects on each sheet to make things right.

It's tomorrow, Jim. Thursday, not Wednesday.