Jaxilon, I just didn't write it out because I'd already practiced the letter 'e' and my hand was cramping . Also I came up with a few different borders but since you liked the first one I'm going with one very similar to it. I'm just replacing the square with a leaf. The square felt too Roman.

After a lot of prep work I've finally started on the final piece. I decided to draw it in a style similar to these: Brussels and London.

I'm considering surrounding the city with canals like brussels though the rivers are closer in size to the Thames (though not quite). It would look something like this:
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I'm just not sure if it's actually a reasonable canal system. The one in Brussels looks really weird. So maybe this works? Advice would be appreciated. Otherwise I'm just going to leave out the canals like my earlier sketch.

In terms of drawing I now have a plan of attack. Sketch lightly with pencil, ink, lightly stain the paper, watercolor. It took a couple scrap drawings to figure out what worked. Plain white was too bright for my taste so after staining the paper with tea I baked the sheet. This warps the paper so it increases the risk of blotting the ink (already wasted a sheet working on the border). I did a small drawing of the sun and inked it before baking and since that worked out, that's the order I'm sticking with. Also I ended up carving my own chisel edged "pen" to do the lettering because the ones I had were either too big, grey or filled with non-waterproof ink.

Prep work composite picture:
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Lastly in all its pale barely started I don't have a scanner large enough glory:

### LATEST WIP ###
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I'm looking forward to drawing in 1000 tiny houses...twice >_<