An efficient approach to the automatic construction of effective quadrilateral finite element meshes for two-dimensional analysis is presented. The procedure is composed of, firstly, an initial mesh generation and, secondly, an h-version of adaptive refinement based on error analysis. As for an initial mesh generation scheme, a modified looping algorithm has been employed. For the adaptive refinement process, an error indicator obtained by computing the residual error of the equilibrium equations in the energy norm with a relaxation factor has been employed. Examples of mesh generation and self-adaptive mesh improvements are given. These example solutions demonstrate that an effective mesh for a given error tolerance can be obtained in a few steps of the analysis processes.