Hello Cartographer's Guild,

My name is Jan. I've been lurking here for a while now, greedily siphoning inspiration from the astounding work being put out here every day and eagerly reading various tutorials and WIP threads to get a glance at some of the workflows of the amazing artists in this guild. I stumbled upon the guild in the commendations of a video on worldbuilding and climates by "Artifexian" on youtube and I was quickly enraptured by the wealth of knowledge and, more importantly, creativity to be found in this community. So thanks to you, "first" of all (I know I ramble on a lot, please forgive me).

Why was I watching that video in the first place, though? Why, because I was building my own world, of course, like so many others on here. I have been working on it sporadically for the last few years, with the first "mapmaking" work being done within the last year. The reason I put that term in apostrophes is because I have so far eschewed putting in things as trivial as borders, labels or legends - basically everything that makes a map actually readable. These are some of the things I look to improve as soon as I have nailed down some of the more basic aspects of my world map. Working on my own, I had previously created a basic coastal outline, a crude tectonic map, a deeply flawed elevation map and worked myself up to a climate map working with azelor's and pixie's tutorials, which was the point at which I noticed some of the deeper flaws with my approach and decided to start over and try to engage with some of the more knowledgeable people found in this community to improve - and show my appreciation for their work all the while.

Thus, I am looking forward to engaging with this community and learning from you!

Jan

Addendum: The attached pictures show basically the point which I have resolved to restart my work from. As you can see: Only the bare bones of what might one day be a world map.

Shadowland.png These are the outlines for the land masses I want to have. I kinda seek to preserve the general shapes through future iterations, but I am not married to anything there.

My Boundaries.png Here we see the plate boundaries (red lines) and the movement of the plates (along the yellow lines toward the orange part of the plate boundaries).

Shadow over Boundaries.png Both combined. Duh.