Wonderdraft

Quick Guides

In this Wonderdraft Quick Guide, we’re going to talk about your landmass and with that, inevitably your oceans as well. This is the first thing you should be doing before adding anything else on the map. Making big changes to your landmass and oceans later often proves to be difficult. Somehow it always turns out to look artificial and it ‘doesn’t seem to fit’ with the rest of the map. To prevent this, choose one of these 4 options that Wonderdraft provides – or a combination of them – and get your perfect landmass and oceans before starting with the rest of your map.

Landmass wizard

In my opinion, the landmass wizard is often highly underestimated. To me, it’s by far the best way to create your landmass (and oceans) if you don’t have a very clear idea of how your world looks like yet. The big benefit of the wizard is that your landmass looks natural and in a similar fashion across the map. Of course, the bonus benefit is that it’s a fast method as well.

A continent generated with the landmass wizard

Import

If you already have a sketch or an existing map of what you want to create In Wonderdraft, you can import the landmass straight into the program. Don’t mistake this for importing complete maps with mountains, rivers and colors. It’s only the landmass that’s imported. The requirements for the map you want to import is that on your original sketch or map, the land is all white and the water is all black (or dark).

The great benefit of this method is that it’s a very fast way of getting the landmass that you want in Wonderdraft. If you want to make a map of the earth? Jus download an image on Google, color the land white and the sea black and import it to Wonderdraft.

Map of the Netherlands based on an imported map I found on Google

Trace tool

The trace tool can be used for different thing of which one is to trace a landmass of an existing map. In many cases, the import a map method is the faster way to do this, but there are reasons why this wouldn’t work properly (e.g. a bad quality original). Another great use of the trace tool is when you have a part of your world drawn out already, but still want to add another continent or island from an existing map. You could import it to a new, empty map and copy/paste the landmass, but you may find it easier to just trace this one extra island onto your map.

In short, the trace tool can be a time-consuming business, but it offers more flexibility than the import tool. After all, you can decide to trace some parts of an original map while altering a different part.

Tracing the coastlines of Britain and Ireland pixel by pixel took me two hours

Brush, raise and lower landmass tool

This is probably the most time-consuming method to create your landmass and oceans. And yet, I see it being used a lot. The fact alone that I can often recognize in a map when this method is used, immediately shows one of the biggest disadvantages: the result is often unnatural. This is not a flaw of the tool itself, but of the impatience of the person using it. Drawing a landmass takes time; it’s not something you do in just 10 minutes. When you do take the time for it however, and use a small enough brush with a rather low roughness, it does have the potential to make beautiful landmasses. It’s just not something I would advise for your first Wonderdraft map or if you’re in a hurry.

The ‘torn’ continents in the west reveal that I used the raise and lower landmass for this map