My Personal Mandalas

Intro

The Mandala project first began when I created the outline in Illustrator. Illustrator is an Adobe program which has a lot of features that make the mandala process smooth. It allows for repetitive patterns to be made and can be created using physical tools like a Wacom Tablet. The Wacom Tablet comes with a pen that is pressure sensitive. This makes it possible for more intricate strokes of the brush tool. While the use the tablet is not the same as drawing on paper, it was very useful because I could draw a section of a mandala and the patterns could repeat with added boundary lines.

My Personal Mandalas

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When I first saw my final laser engraved mandala on bamboo, I admired the burned engraving outline added to the objects I drew. The physical mandala is almost uncannily similar to the mandala I drew on Illustrator. The only point of concern for me initially was the weird blank spaces because I had a drawing boundary active to see where I could draw. I wish I could have filled in a little of that blank space. I chose bamboo because the texture of the material follows one direction and would give a clean look with the burned in engraving outlines. It represents me because it is a strong material that doesn’t break easily. In my opinion, bamboo is more durable than wood. In a way, I thought it could represent the resilience to keep moving forward in life. When I think about the whole mandala project from the beginning of making the templates in Illustrator with pressure sensitive brushes, I thought it made the entire process more unique. What I mean is that the brushes made the artistic making of creating my own mandala more complex than it would have been with only basic strict lines for the engraving design. Honestly, I didn’t enjoy making the mandala-colored version as much and I much preferred making the BW mandala. I like having my mandala in BW because I struggled to make sure that the shape of my objects got lost in colors. Experimenting with color is one of my weaknesses but I do appreciate that I got to practice using color in my artwork.

The artwork is called Mandala and I decided to make it completely different to my black and white Mandala. I wanted to use bright vibrant colors in the center and it is surrounded by the dark forest. In my black and white mandala, a lot of my themes were about places I liked and my characteristics. For example I drew different elements like fire and water. Elements that can be strong forces in nature and in the center of it all is a flower. My colored mandala doesn’t focus on that but focuses on showing light in the center of all the darkness. Using contrasting colors and gradients helped make it seem like there was a drastic difference between the forest outer edge of the mandala and the bug designs in the center. Almost like there are two worlds. Working with color changed my artistic technique by propelling me to draw the outline very differently from my black and white mandala. I wanted to make sure I made the black line art more clear to make the coloring process easier. I tried to limit the varying outline lengths of when I first started drawing so the workflow later on would go smoother. What stood out the most to me was getting to draw the leaves for the trees. The drawing technique is similar to how I drew the vines in my first mandala. I found it to be very satisfying to draw them. I am surprised with the different objects that I drew because usually I run out of ideas and end up drawing something I already drew recently.

The ideas I learned from this project was learning about things that I value and enjoy in life. I want to use the beach aesthetic and experiment with how I can represent time in projects that I will work on later. The project really helped me to see that I can remake a design I used before but in a new way that conveys a different feeling. For the nature aspect of my mandala, I like how it felt free. The vines I drew looked like snakes because of their shape. So, I can draw vines again in the future, but it doesn’t necessarily have to look the same. Mandala Build Video was created using After Effects. It allows for me to create special effects like fade in and outs. I can show recordings with music to have a more enhanced experience when someone watches my videos. The program is very useful for creating videos to upload to Youtube where many of my products are uploaded at Freestyle Academy’s channel.

Art Curation for Personal Museum

To introduce the Art Curation Project, Freestyle Academy was hosting a field trip to go to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The works of art that I would typically deem worth to be in my own museum were ones that had some aspects of nature to them. I also would include artworks that are related/references to things that I enjoy. For example, I would include artwork that may reference a design from an album cover. This would show my taste in art but answer the question “Who am I?”. I believe the question is answered by showing things that bring joy into my life. Things that give a sense of peace like nature landscapes and others such as escaping from reality through music. Abstract artworks conflict with my taste and are an indicator of things that I don’t associate with myself. When something is abstract, I often become frustrated and I express it with a few certain artworks that I will include in this section.

My own perspective on what I like to see in art is the use of color shouldn’t be something that doesn’t feel overwhelming. In general I like neutral colors and the use of vibrant colors is used sparingly. There should be at least 2 colors in a piece of artwork with the exception of having some form of line art. A lot of my own work had objects like plants and animals so it makes me a bit biased for what kind of artwork I usually like. I do think good art doesn’t have to have those aspects but just has to have some kind of subject that the artwork is centered around so the viewer has something to look at. Basic colors and shapes can be used but if it’s the only thing to look at and there are only a few then I don’t really like those types of artworks.