It's the start of a new month, so Ralf will be showing off the latest Cartographer's Annual issue in the live mapping session tomorrow. We hope you can join us!

Come watch it live on YouTube and join in the chat to ask your own questions here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_L7cjQY2m2c

Or you can watch it at any time either on YouTube or here on the forum*

* This thread isn't monitored during the live mapping session, but is a place where you can discuss and comment on the show at any time.

You have to be a member of the Cartographer's Guild to see those, but I get what you are saying. It wouldn't be right to snatch them and paste them here either, I don't think.

So your second look is a very lose general description. I would experiment with various combinations of shapes, colours and effects and see what you come up with, using sheets above the SCREEN and being mindful of where the thin green line of the MAP BORDER lies to include the decoration.

Thinking about the first look, and glancing at the edge of my current monitor a couple of additional sheets would do it. In this example (originally MS Overland which I know all users have) I have added an INNER BORDER and OUTER FRAME sheet setup and drawn a shape on each to represent those parts. Both are on the SCREEN layer.

The 'monitor off' background is just a grey polygon on the BACKGROUND sheet, which I moved to the MAP BORDER layer and resized to include the border and frame details for an automatic export of the whole. I then froze the MAP BORDER and SCREEN layers as is my habit.

I hope this gives you a few ideas.

I'm not sure what you are after with the second look.

If I were doing this I would first make sure the source maps covered an identical area by trimming them together in an image editor (PS, Affinity Photo, GIMP - take your pick). Then I would turn on the snap grid and import them one after the other, using the same snap points to define their extent. Once they are in CC3 you can scale them together, so keeping the alignment you've already set up.

There are probably many other ways you can do it. This is just the way I would do it.

This might help. The difference between a plateau, a mesa and a butte is one of scale alone, and mesas may be a huge range of sizes.

A plateau may be thousands of square miles in area and is usually flattish on top, while a mesa is an eroded section of a plateau that has cliffs all around it. Mesas are wider than they are tall. A butte is an eroded mesa, much smaller, and usually taller than it is wide.