Hello pabadger :)

The simplest way to do this is to Use the Land drawing tool to draw a third landmass that traces both of the existing ones. 

1. First, ensure that both those landmasses are made of straight polygons instead of smooth ones by right clicking the Fractalise button |CC2FRX|and picking smooth to straight. Use the tool to turn both landmasses straight. This may make it look slightly different if they happen to be smooth, but you can reverse the process using Straight to Smooth from the same right click menu on the new landmass when you are done tracing.

2. Pick the land drawing tool (preferably the straight one if there is a choice) and click once on any point of the land, then press letter T on your keyboard to enter tracing mode.

3. Pick the coast not far away from where you started, and then start the trace with a second click between where you started the line and where you indicated the trace operation. 

4. Drag the trace line to where the two landmasses join, making sure you don't trace any of that bit where it overlaps, and end the first trace by clicking there. Don't end the drawing. Just end the trace operation. Then press T again and start a second trace operation to trace all the way around the other landmass until you get back to the other side of the overlap.

5. Do a third trace to finish the job by completing the trace around the first landmass back to where you started. When you get there, that is the point where you need to end the third trace and then finish the drawing operation. 

Once the single landmass has been drawn in that single 3 part tracing operation you can delete the 2 older parts, and turn the coastline back to smooth if you prefer it that way.

Yes - frozen lakes and all kinds of other stuff too :)

If the shapes are on the same sheet just add the transparency effect. It is applied to the sheet, rather than to individual polygons, so you won't be able to see the overlap.

If these shapes are on different sheets, and if they are only ever to have a transparency applied and no other sheet effects, the easiest way is probably to add a Colour Key effect to the sheet with the pale green polygon on it, and then copy the dark green polygon onto that sheet and use Change Properties to turn the copy solid colour and magenta (the colour of the colour key). This will cut the precise shape out of the pale green polygon.

If you mean to have these polygons on separate sheets and with sheet effects like Edge Fade, Inner applied, then things could be a little more complicated, but still it shouldn't be necessary to actually trim anything at all.

It's a pity you can't do it the way I do it in dreams. The water exists as air. The only way I can tell I'm underwater is the light, the ripples in the sky, and the creatures swimming past. Think Mars gravity, thick air you can fly through if you flap your arms, coral and kelp instead of grass and trees, and 'flocks' of fish flying past instead of birds.

@Wyvern - take away the coral, leave the starfish and urchin, and add barnacles, mussels and limpets instead... do you think these colours would be a nice compromise for both tropical and temperate seas?

I've also split the rocks so that the underwater ones are darker, and the shore ones have wet sides.

Once a polygon is shaded you can rotate it intact. the shading will stay aligned to that side of the polygon. Try it and see.

Wouldn't it be interesting to have a 'click counter' app for the mouse so we could see how many were actually involved in making a map.

Hi Everyone :)

In this week's Live Mapping session Ralf will be creating a map in the Mercator Historical style, which was the very first issue of the very first Cartographer's Annual 15 years ago now.

Come along and join in the fun! :)

You can use a Color Key on the coast side of the snow to stop it peeling back. This is a different setup where I've used other effects as well as the Edge Fade/Color Key combo, but if I turn those effects off, you can see what I've done here.

There are 2 polys on the same sheet. Light and dark pink (the light pink represents the snow). The dark pink will be removed by the Color Key, but before that the combined area is eroded by the edge fade. The end result is that where the light pink is the edge of the combined area that edge will be faded, but where it is protected by the dark pink it will remain.

An alternative to this is to use the same snow texture on your tundra sheet, but you can have transparency acne issues if you do it that way.

Looking good :)

If you are wondering why some of the terrain has sharp edges that's because the Edge Fade Inner sheet effect only acts on the outside edge of the combined polygons on that sheet. To give them all the same faded edge all the way around it may be necessary to create LAND FEATURES 1, LAND FEATURES 2, etc, and copy the EFI effects across to the new sheets, then move some of the land feature polygons to the new sheets. To avoid confusion I sometimes call them TERRAIN DESERT, TERRAIN MARSH, etc, so I know exactly what sheet something should be on when I move it.

Where you do forests you can make them look more natural by dotting a thinning band of single trees around the edge to break up the hard line.