How do you come up with your continent-shapes or regional-shapes?

[baamenabar]

Several times I've found chipped paint or deteriorated in walls to be very inspiring, I snap a picture, trace it, and play arround joining splitting untill it looks fine.
Like these:

[Chashio]

Several times I've found chipped paint or deteriorated in walls to be very inspiring, I snap a picture, trace it, and play arround joining splitting untill it looks fine.

I do that too. It works with coffee, rocks, clouds, moss clumps, broken glass, etc. Ink blots are a good source too. Etc etc... You can combine random objects until you have something you like. Get some paper with a random grain such as handmade paper (big art/craft stores like Michael's and AC Moore usually have this in the scrapbook aisle) or find a sketchbook with a subtle variation (it's very subtle--think watermark--but it can help with drawing coastlines). Buying a lot of special paper can get expensive though, so you might want to pick up a pad of tracing paper and draw on that so you can use your special inspiration paper more than once.

Also:
- Pull out a world atlas and flip through til you find a shape you like, grab a sheet of paper and a pencil and visually copy it (draw on the paper while following the atlas coastlines with your eyes). You'll get something similar but not a direct match. It also improves your hand-eye coordination with a lot of practice Also good to just study the shapes in the atlas (or google maps) to build up an eye for natural-looking coast with different terrain types.

- Hand-drawn masking: draw the general shape you want, on paper with a good dark pen with lots of flow, then 'chew' into your shape to refine the landmass (the interior white space is your landmass). You can leave some white space for islands as you work in, or build them up on the outside of your original line. Scan it--or take a photo--then select and mask it off. Or if you're working on paper, trace it onto your mapping paper with a graphite transfer sheet. Or if you have a tablet you could just do it on the computer... but be sure to bump up your resolution so that the brush doesn't snag on the horizontal and vertical lines so easily.