Question: I'm trying to achieve an effect similar to this: 

![http://www.state.gov/cms_images/france_map_2007-worldfactbook2.jpg](https://i.stack.imgur.com/spJ57.jpg)

Notice how France is brighter than the other countries. It has the 'focus'. I've been exploring the API and it looks like I'm supposed use `kmlLayers` to achieve this effect. Is this correct? If so, how do I leverage or even find kml to do this? How else could I do this?

Thanks

Answer: 
I found this can be done with polygons and 'holes'. Google has [this pentagon example](http://gmaps-samples-v3.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/poly/pentagon.html)

The only down side is the polygon needs to be drawn by hand (maybe there's a database of country outlines?) I used [this tool](http://www.birdtheme.org/useful/v3tool.html) to assist with the manual drawing for now.
this demo shows you how: <https://google-developers.appspot.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/layer-kml>

aight, got kml for france; working demo: <http://dev.bowdenweb.com/maps/gmaps/layer-kml-02.html>