Oceania · Micronesia
How to draw Palau from memory
Palau comes in 2 separate pieces on the map. The main body is taller than it is wide; sketch that first, then place the smaller pieces relative to it. Its border sits in the middle of the difficulty range — enough straight sections to anchor you, enough detail to punish a careless stroke.
- Difficulty
- medium
- Population
- 18 k
- Code
- PLW
Draw Palau
Practice · draw from memory
Palau
A four-step strategy for Palau
- 01
Start with a tall, narrow mental guide box. Palau 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
Finish the main landmass completely, then add the remaining 1 piece as separate strokes. Scoring counts total covered area, so an unclosed island can hurt more than a missing one.
- 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 Palau
Nobody has submitted a score for Palau yet. Draw it above and you are first on this board.
Full leaderboard →Quick facts
- Continent
- Oceania
- Subregion
- Micronesia
- Outline pieces
- 2
- Detail score
- 2.97
Three things that go wrong when people sketch Palau
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.
5% of the country is not the mainland
The outline is made of 2 separate pieces, and the largest one carries only 95% of the area. Sketched without the rest, the shape is short by that much even when the mainland is perfect — place the outlying piece first, then draw the mainland around it.
The east edge is a ruler line, not a coast
About 20% 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.
It narrows sharply toward the north
The outline is 2.8× wider at the bottom of the shape than at the top, so the broad part belongs in the south. Most failed sketches here put the wide section at the wrong end.
Answer key: the real shape of Palau
- Box on the canvas
- 329 × 440 units
- Width to height
- 0.75 : 1
- Separate landmasses
- 2
- Longest straight run
- 20% of the perimeter, along the east
- Coast against silhouette
- 1.13× the wrapping outline
Open it after you have drawn Palau 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 Palau is scored this way
Country Drawing does not compare your sketch to a picture of Palau. 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 Palau 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.
Palau by the numbers
Palau covers 459 km², which makes it the 177th largest of 190 countries in the game and the 11th largest in Oceania. The capital is Ngerulmud at about 8°N, 135°E, and it sits in Micronesia. It shares no land border at all, so every metre of the outline you have to draw is coastline.
Next to Palau: 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 Palau |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Palauthis page | 459 km² | 18 k | Ngerulmud | 2 | — |
 Kiribati | 811 km² | 118 k | South Tarawa | 14 | 1.77× |
 Marshall Islands | 181 km² | 59 k | Majuro | 5 | 0.39× |
 Micronesia | 702 km² | 114 k | Palikir | 5 | 1.53× |
 Nauru | 21 km² | 13 k | Yaren | 1 | 0.05× |
 Australia | 7,692,024 km² | 25.4 m | Canberra | 1 | 16758× |
 Fiji | 18,272 km² | 890 k | Suva | 4 | 40× |
 New Zealand | 270,467 km² | 4.9 m | Wellington | 2 | 589× |
 Papua New Guinea | 462,840 km² | 8.8 m | Port Moresby | 3 | 1008× |
Draw these next
Countries near Palau 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 the world and label the whole region from memory — it shows you which neighbours you have never actually seen.
Palau drawing questions
How big is Palau?
Palau covers 459 km², ranking 177th of 190 countries here by land area and 11th in Oceania. Small enough to lie inside a square roughly 21.4 km on a side.
What is the capital of Palau?
The capital is Ngerulmud at about 8°N, 135°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 Palau on a blank map.
Is Palau hard to draw?
It is rated medium, and carries more outline detail than 56% of the 190 borders in this game. The shape has to be placed as 2 landmasses, with about 20% of the perimeter running dead straight along the east.
Does Palau border any country?
Palau has no land borders: every metre of its outline is coastline, which is why it rates as medium.