Hey, thanks for the small tutorial and some hints (wasn't aware of this rotate feature for example).
I did the maps i did so far pretty much the same way: rivers and lakes first, roads and railways right after followed by towns. The remaining space then got filled with forests first and fields after. Since theres a lot of trees along rural roads and occasionally between fields in Germany, i put them in last.
One fair warning on Venhola: it uses SRTM (radar from space) collected elevation data which results in odd "hills" on the location of towns, forests and such - took me a while to realize that's NOT hills (!), it's the elevation of trees (10-60m in Europe) and buildings in towns registered by the radar and interpreted as hills by Venhola then.
One might want to keep that in mind regarding elevation settings and interpretation of the topography.
Mapping a region with big difference in elevation (and therefore higher level setting necessary then 10) will probably compensate that tree height.
But since the region i do maps of right now (LOWER saxony
) are so flat (around 40m in height difference lowest to highest on 200x160), changing the level setting in Venhola really doesn't help (20 already sucks up most "real" elevation) so i do it manually right now by lowering by 10 (cutting off 1 level of hills) where Forests or towns are.