This week Ralf will be presenting the Banners & Seals symbol pack from the Cartographer's Annual 2021. As part of the process he will also be explaining catalogue settings and how to create them, so it is well worth coming along to see how it is done.

You can visit Youtube and book a reminder by clicking the link above.

Thanks for the announcement, Wyvern :)

Hi Driechel :)

The only way to really make it work is to put the ocean above the land, and put all the water on the same sheet, whether it is river or ocean. If that river is going to be a major feature of your map it might be worth drawing it as an extension of the sea, rather than an additional line with a width. That will help even more.

As for sheet effects, a light shore can be created by having a paler blue glow set to inner on the water sheet. Deeper water can be added a couple of different ways, but I'll not get too far ahead of where you are just yet.

Here is a small section of a map I'm working on now that shows what I mean. The water is above the land, even though the sheet effects are designed to make it look like the land is above the water. You can see how drawing the rivers as part of the ocean in city maps can make a lot of difference.

You could go back to the original and use File->Resize Drawing Area to make that one the size you really want it to be.

Or if you've done too much work in your new map to want to go back to it...

In the Draw menu there is a Draw Like command. You can use this to pick up the properties of any polygon entity in the drawing and be ready to draw with those properties.

Alternatively, having picked up the properties from the more desirable landmass you can then use Change Properties to change the properties of the others. The defaults offered to you in the Change Properties dialog will at that point be the ones you need to make them match.

Be careful, though. Some landmass drawing tools draw polygons on different sheets, like the Mike Schley style for one. In that case you should hide all but the LAND sheet, or all but the COASTLINE sheet, and work on them separately.

Start with a new flat world and import your bitmap as an image overlay. Depending on what the image is like you can then use it to make a selection to raise the land from the sea and sculpt it from there.