thank you - I started with pasis tutorial and expanded from there. Made my own style for the cities going for symbols instead of "picture", especially since the cities aren't real-size anyway. Saw your beautiful artwork with the mountain yesterday - and you expressed working with layers instead of brushes. Well, I love layers.. don't know how many layers my map is at the moment but I'm guessing I've crossed 100 ... and I also use the copy-then-move-layer technique for lots of stuff - works fine for me