Before you import the image file you want to trace to your CC3+ drawing, make sure you have a copy of the image file in the same folder as your CC3+ map. If you don't do this, you may well end up with a big red cross where your image file should be the next time you open it, because CC3+ can't find it any more.

There are other ways to avoid this happening, but keeping the files in the same folder is by far the easiest to tell you about quickly here.

I do this all the time, and it becomes second nature after only a short time; import, rescale, and get mapping!

Thanks @Ricko. In cases like this, I simply try to work with the original style as far as possible, and it is practical to "force" the Mike Schley cliffs to work as north-facing, even if it does mean quite a bit more effort. It would certainly be helpful to have some north-facing cliffs in this style already though!

For the central valley here, I simply added a Solid 10 polygon over the lower part to darken it a little. The effect is very subtle, but I found using the Solid 20 fill felt too obvious, whereas this seemed to help the effect just enough to fool the eye - to me, at least 😎.

Glad you got that sorted. Those are nice-looking floorplans!

Ellipses are fairly straightforward in CC3+. Just right-click on the Circle drawing tool icon - |CC2CIRP| - to call up the options list, and there's an Ellipse tool right there.

Spirals are a lot trickier though. Remy Monsen wrote a blog post about creating a macro to draw a spiral here, and although writing macros like this is pretty advanced stuff compared to simply drawing things and placing symbols using the program, they will let you automate much more sophisticated tasks with elegance. That blog post is the third in a short series of three on using macros, and you may find it useful to read through all of them (there are links at the end of that "spiral" post) if you're unfamiliar with how they're written before embarking on spiral design tests. And as usual, if you get stuck, just ask again here!

The other key element is the Color Key effect MUST be at the top of the effects list for that Sheet, or it doesn't work.

Your first comment sounds like the pink shape is being drawn on the wrong sheet. If you're using a drawing tool to create it, that may be set to a different default sheet than the one your Color Key effect is on. If so, it's easily changed by simply carrying out a Change Properties command immediately after finishing drawing the shape - so before it vanishes (you can check to see which sheet it's drawing on while you're drawing it in the information boxes along the top of the CC3+ screen).

I'm guessing that the fractal poly's ending up on the wrong sheet too, as there's no reason it wouldn't work properly just because it's a fractal shape.