Africa · Eastern Africa
How to draw Madagascar from memory
Madagascar is a single continuous landmass, taller than it is wide. Lock that proportion in before you worry about any individual stretch of border. Its border is simple by world standards, which makes it a good place to build confidence — and also means a low score here has nowhere to hide.
- Difficulty
- easy
- Population
- 27.0 m
- Code
- MDG
Draw Madagascar
Practice · draw from memory
Madagascar
A four-step strategy for Madagascar
- 01
Start with a tall, narrow mental guide box. Madagascar is much taller than it is wide, and squashing it is the single most common mistake.
- 02
Anchor one unmistakable feature — the straightest border section or the sharpest cape — and draw outward from it in a single continuous stroke.
- 03
Close the loop back to where you started. An open shape gets filled unpredictably and drags your score down.
- 04
Submit, read the nine-sector grid, and redraw immediately. The sector readout names the region you under-drew, and a second attempt typically gains 10–20 points.
Top scores for Madagascar
Nobody has submitted a score for Madagascar yet. Draw it above and you are first on this board.
Full leaderboard →Quick facts
- Continent
- Africa
- Subregion
- Eastern Africa
- Outline pieces
- 1
- Detail score
- 2.24
Three things that go wrong when people sketch Madagascar
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.
The east edge is a ruler line, not a coast
About 12% of the perimeter runs in one unbroken direction along the east. Rivers and capes do not do that; a border was drawn on a map. Straighten it deliberately — a wobbly line there throws the whole bounding box.
Madagascar is taller than it is wide
The finished outline holds a ratio of about 0.51 to 1, a vertical shape. Most failed attempts come from defaulting to a squarish blob — and unlike position, aspect ratio is never normalised away by the scorer.
Close the loop before adding detail
Madagascar occupies a 222×440 unit box on the game canvas. Fill that box with one continuous closed stroke first: the scorer compares filled area, so an open outline loses the interior it never enclosed.
Answer key: the real shape of Madagascar
- Box on the canvas
- 222 × 440 units
- Width to height
- 0.51 : 1
- Separate landmasses
- 1
- Longest straight run
- 12% of the perimeter, along the east
- Coast against silhouette
- 1.23× the wrapping outline
Open it after you have drawn Madagascar at least once. Seeing the shape first replaces the recall the score is meant to measure with tracing, and tracing always scores higher than remembering.
Why Madagascar is scored this way
Country Drawing does not compare your sketch to a picture of Madagascar. 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 Madagascar 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 eastern edge rather than just handing you a number.
Madagascar by the numbers
Madagascar covers 587,041 km², which makes it the 44th largest of 190 countries in the game and the 21st largest in Africa. The capital is Antananarivo at about 20°S, 47°E, and it sits in Eastern Africa. It shares no land border at all, so every metre of the outline you have to draw is coastline.
Next to Madagascar: 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.
| Country | Area | Population | Capital | Pieces | vs Madagascar |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Madagascarthis page | 587,041 km² | 27.0 m | Antananarivo | 1 | — |
 Burundi | 27,834 km² | 11.5 m | Gitega | 1 | 0.05× |
 Comoros | 1,862 km² | 851 k | Moroni | 3 | <0.01× |
 Djibouti | 23,200 km² | 974 k | Djibouti | 1 | 0.04× |
 Eritrea | 117,600 km² | 6.1 m | Asmara | 1 | 0.2× |
 Ethiopia | 1,104,300 km² | 112.1 m | Addis Ababa | 1 | 1.88× |
 Kenya | 580,367 km² | 52.6 m | Nairobi | 1 | 0.99× |
 Malawi | 118,484 km² | 18.6 m | Lilongwe | 1 | 0.2× |
 Mozambique | 801,590 km² | 30.4 m | Maputo | 1 | 1.37× |
Draw these next
Countries near Madagascar 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 africa and label the whole region from memory — it shows you which neighbours you have never actually seen.
Madagascar drawing questions
How big is Madagascar?
Madagascar covers 587,041 km², ranking 44th of 190 countries here by land area and 21st in Africa. That is 1.1 times the area of France.
What is the capital of Madagascar?
The capital is Antananarivo at about 20°S, 47°E. The game scores the shape of the border rather than the position of any city, so the capital and its coordinates are here to help you place Madagascar on a blank map.
Is Madagascar hard to draw?
It is rated easy, and carries more outline detail than 33% of the 190 borders in this game. The shape has to be placed as 1 landmass, with about 12% of the perimeter running dead straight along the east.
Does Madagascar border any country?
Madagascar has no land borders: every metre of its outline is coastline, which is why it rates as easy even so — the coast simply does not fold back on itself.