Mapmaking Advice, Tips, and Tricks thread

[DJjablonski]

As the title says, a thread for anything from your whole mapping how to, to just the little tips and tricks you use to make the process a little easier.

To start the whole bit off, I'll give a little trick I use frequently:

Let's say your coming up with town/city names for some sort of alternate settler colony. And you can't think of a name for it. My little trick? just go to the mother country on google maps, zoom in, and pick some small town you landed on. Not the best way, as the town may not make sense for who is settling the area, but it works decently well for me at least, just look at the towns Wikipedia article first.

 

[Prince di Corsica]

Can we ask for advice here as well? Because I'd love to know some tricks on how to portray topography in maps, give a sense of the mountains and whatnot. It really gives depth and aesthetic beauty to maps, but my attempts at it always fall short

 

[Tomislav Addai]

If you are not into playing with borders and want your maps drawn easily, use Paradox basemaps or URHAFAH basemap, which allows you to make the whole process much faster (you don't need to care about borders and stuff).
Small problem: some of the borders are based upon modern day gerrymandering

 

[water123]

On paint, you can left click the eraser to change the foreground color into the background color, super useful when you're tryna color all those tiny ass islands in Pacific South America for example.