Help with tectonics

[Laime]

thebax2k
Thanks for your advice ^_^ I sort of mashed the continent parts together in PS and they kind of made sense. I utilized India-like continent part a lot (a piece breaking off from one plate to drift into another), so I guess on the first glance it does look like they don't fit. I tried to fix the 'drawing the circles around continents' problem, it does look sort of better now.

I looked for places to draw islands - they are marked with brown triangles now. Does that make sense?

Sadly, it din't occur to me to do a forum search, which I guess speaks volumes about my IQ ^_^. I'll search the guild and hopefully understand half of the things people write.

As for why I need that headache at all, I just feel better prepared. For me it's like building a house - if the foundation isn't there, it's hard to do much else. When I'm finished with tectonics, I'll be doing winds and climate, and then I'll pull out my history and anthropology books... I'm pretty obsessive about stuff like that ^_^

[thebax2k]

I can certainly understand building something from the ground (er tectonic plates) up

Your second map looks better than the first. I would fiddle with the directions of the plates a bit though and have more plates in collision. For instance, you've got a massive mountain chain in the west of plate 9, yet plate 6 and plate 9 appear to both be heading "north" (or at least "up"). You are not going to get massive Himalaya type mountains (maybe I'm misinterpreting your mountain depictions, but it sure looks Himalaya like) unless you have two plates that are pushing/colliding against each other (which is what the Indian plate has been doing to the Asian plate for the last several million years).

Your triangles are fine as temporary markers for where you wish to place your islands. Not every plate collision will have islands, but there were a few areas that did not have islands that had me scratching my head a bit (such as the boundary at 9, 14, and 16 and the boundary between 2 and 17 which are pressing against each other). As for island size, you can make them any size you want, but I would have very large islands (New Zealand, Iceland, Japan sized) on or near the boundaries of 3 or more plates.

Keep working at it Laime, you have the fundamentals of a great map here.