Oceania · Melanesia
How to draw Vanuatu from memory
Vanuatu is not one shape but 14 — an archipelago. Draw the largest landmass first and treat the rest as satellites, because a handful of missed islets costs far less than getting the main island wrong. It ranks among the hardest countries to draw: the border carries far more detail than a freehand stroke can capture, so anything above 50 is a strong result.
- Difficulty
- hard
- Population
- 300 k
- Code
- VUT
Draw Vanuatu
Practice · draw from memory
Vanuatu
A four-step strategy for Vanuatu
- 01
Start by fixing the overall footprint. Vanuatu is close to square overall, so a lopsided sketch loses points fast.
- 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 13 pieces 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 Vanuatu
Nobody has submitted a score for Vanuatu yet. Draw it above and you are first on this board.
Full leaderboard →Quick facts
- Continent
- Oceania
- Subregion
- Melanesia
- Outline pieces
- 14
- Detail score
- 14.75
Three things that go wrong when people sketch Vanuatu
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.
65% of the country is not the mainland
The outline is made of 14 separate pieces, and the largest one carries only 35% 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 west edge is a ruler line, not a coast
About 12% of the perimeter runs in one unbroken direction along the west. 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 3× 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 Vanuatu
- Box on the canvas
- 217 × 440 units
- Width to height
- 0.49 : 1
- Separate landmasses
- 14
- Longest straight run
- 12% of the perimeter, along the west
- Coast against silhouette
- 1.23× the wrapping outline
Open it after you have drawn Vanuatu 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 Vanuatu is scored this way
Country Drawing does not compare your sketch to a picture of Vanuatu. 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 Vanuatu 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.
Vanuatu by the numbers
Vanuatu covers 12,189 km², which makes it the 156th largest of 190 countries in the game and the 6th largest in Oceania. The capital is Port Vila at about 16°S, 167°E, and it sits in Melanesia. It shares no land border at all, so every metre of the outline you have to draw is coastline.
Next to Vanuatu: 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 Vanuatu |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vanuatuthis page | 12,189 km² | 300 k | Port Vila | 14 | — |
 Fiji | 18,272 km² | 890 k | Suva | 4 | 1.5× |
 Papua New Guinea | 462,840 km² | 8.8 m | Port Moresby | 3 | 38× |
 Solomon Islands | 28,896 km² | 670 k | Honiara | 14 | 2.37× |
 Australia | 7,692,024 km² | 25.4 m | Canberra | 1 | 631× |
 Kiribati | 811 km² | 118 k | South Tarawa | 14 | 0.07× |
 Marshall Islands | 181 km² | 59 k | Majuro | 5 | 0.01× |
 Micronesia | 702 km² | 114 k | Palikir | 5 | 0.06× |
 Nauru | 21 km² | 13 k | Yaren | 1 | <0.01× |
Draw these next
Countries near Vanuatu 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.
Vanuatu drawing questions
How big is Vanuatu?
Vanuatu covers 12,189 km², ranking 156th of 190 countries here by land area and 6th in Oceania. Small enough to lie inside a square roughly 110.4 km on a side.
What is the capital of Vanuatu?
The capital is Port Vila at about 16°S, 167°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 Vanuatu on a blank map.
Is Vanuatu hard to draw?
It is rated hard, and carries more outline detail than 96% of the 190 borders in this game. The shape has to be placed as 14 landmasses, with about 12% of the perimeter running dead straight along the west.
Does Vanuatu border any country?
Vanuatu has no land borders: every metre of its outline is coastline, which is why it rates as hard.