How can I just get land and water layers that I can style with different fills and outlines?
Really – Just "land is green, water is blue" layers (that I can then add other layers on top of)
I'm wanting/tempted to use QuickOSM and get a vector layer of one or many polygons to use as "land" such that I can color the land and also color the water (or background, or "not land").
I'm new to GIS so please let me know if there are better ways to do this. Natural Earth Isn't detailed enough – I'm looking at roughly 1:10000 scale.
I've been able to get some boundaries and lines and admin zones but none are just the land. They all are bits and pieces that would need to get stacked and flattened and there must be an easier way (right?). I'm exporting as an image into illustrator/inkscape so I'm looking to create areas that I can fill and style and outline etc.
Best Answer
In OSM, there are no land polygons. If you download a small area of coast, you'll see that the border between ocean and land is actually modeled as lines with natural = coastline key-value pairs.
Instead of preparing the data yourself, you might want to use https://osmdata.openstreetmap.de
If you don't specifically need OSM data, you could download land and ocean data from https://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/