How to draw Iceland from memory

Three things that go wrong when people sketch Iceland

Each one is measured off the outline the game scores, not copied from a reference atlas: the proportions, the straight sections and the way the shape breaks into pieces are all properties of the coordinates your stroke gets compared against.

• Not one straight edge to anchor the shape

  The longest unbroken run in the whole outline is under 8% of the perimeter, and the coast folds back 2.09× on the smooth ring that would wrap it. Choose two deep inlets and one sharp promontory as anchors, and let everything between them stay approximate.

• It narrows sharply toward the south

  Measured across, the outline is 2.3× wider near its northern edge than near its southern one. A sketch that keeps the same width all the way down looks plausible and scores badly, because a missing taper is missing area.

• Iceland is wider than it is tall

  The finished outline holds a ratio of about 1.48 to 1, a horizontal shape. Most failed attempts come from defaulting to a squarish blob — and unlike position, aspect ratio is never normalised away by the scorer.

Why Iceland is scored this way

Country Drawing does not compare your sketch to a picture of Iceland. It scales and centres both your stroke and the real border into the same box, fills them, and measures how much of the two shapes overlap relative to their combined area. That means you are never punished for drawing Iceland small, off to one side, or rotated slightly — only for getting the shape itself wrong. The nine-sector grid then splits the real border into a 3×3 mesh and reports coverage per cell, which is how it can tell you that you lost the whole coastline rather than just handing you a number.

Iceland by the numbers

Iceland covers 103,000 km², which makes it the 105th largest of 190 countries in the game and the 16th largest in Europe. The capital is Reykjavik at about 65°N, 18°W, and it sits in Northern Europe. It shares no land border at all, so every metre of the outline you have to draw is coastline.

Next to Iceland: regional peers

Size is what the outline has to fill, so comparing countries of the same region side by side is the fastest way to get the proportions into your head before you draw.

Iceland compared with nearby countries: area, population, capital and the number of separate outlines the game fills

Country	Area	Population	Capital	Pieces	vs Iceland
Icelandthis page	103,000 km²	361 k	Reykjavik	1	—
Denmark	43,094 km²	5.8 m	Copenhagen	4	0.42×
Estonia	45,227 km²	1.3 m	Tallinn	3	0.44×
Finland	338,424 km²	5.5 m	Helsinki	1	3.29×
Ireland	70,273 km²	4.9 m	Dublin	1	0.68×
Latvia	64,559 km²	1.9 m	Riga	1	0.63×
Lithuania	65,300 km²	2.8 m	Vilnius	1	0.63×
Norway	323,802 km²	5.3 m	Oslo	4	3.14×
Sweden	450,295 km²	10.3 m	Stockholm	1	4.37×

Draw these next

Countries near Iceland share border conventions and coastline styles, which makes them the most useful follow-up practice.

Working through one country at a time is slow. Take the blank map of europe and label the whole region from memory — it shows you which neighbours you have never actually seen.

Iceland drawing questions