Ask a room of players what Iran looks like and someone will say 'a cat' within seconds — ears, back, tail and all. What nobody remembers is that the cat stands on two different seas at once, and the shoreline along the Strait of Hormuz does a hard little turn that decides most of the score.
The shape at a glance
Iran is a broad, solid mass clearly wider than tall, roughly three units across for every two down. The northwest throws out an arm between Turkey and Iraq, the northeast is bitten by the Caspian Sea coast, and the bottom runs along the Persian Gulf before bending east along the Gulf of Oman toward Pakistan. Overall it reads as a chunky animal crouching with its head up in the northwest.
Step by step
- Start with a wide horizontal mass, about one and a half times wider than tall, sitting slightly left of center on your canvas.
- Push out a northwest arm pointing up-left — the provinces that wedge between Turkey and Iraq.
- Carve the Caspian coast into the top-right: a concave bite with a small eastward curl where Turkmenistan begins.
- Run the bottom edge along the Persian Gulf from the Iraqi corner, a long diagonal descending to the right.
- At the Strait of Hormuz, make a distinct corner and bend the coast horizontally east along the Gulf of Oman.
- Finish the eastern side with a long, fairly straight diagonal up toward the Afghan border so the whole east leans.
Mistakes that cost you points
- Leaving out the Caspian notch, which flattens the top-right into a wrong-looking straight edge.
- Drawing one continuous smooth southern coast and missing the corner at the Strait of Hormuz.
- Forgetting the northwest arm, which removes the 'head' of the cat entirely.
- Making the eastern border vertical when it actually slants hard toward Pakistan.
Place it on the map
Iran is the big mass between the Caspian Sea above and the Persian Gulf below, with Iraq on its left shoulder and Afghanistan and Pakistan trailing off to the right. If you can place Turkey's east end and the Arabian Sea, Iran is everything between them.
Pro tip: Draw the two seas first as empty bites — the Caspian scoop on top and the Gulf scoop below — and let the land appear between them. Scoring rewards the negative space as much as the coastline, and Iran's silhouette is defined by its water.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How do you draw Iran from memory?
- Start with the overall box — is Iran wider than tall or the reverse — then place its signature feature first and build the rest of the outline around it. Finish with the coastline details, then compare against the real border in a free practice round to get a 0-100 score.
- How hard is it to draw Iran?
- Iran rates as medium difficulty. The cat-like outline is memorable, but the Caspian notch and the two southern coastlines take real shaping.