{"id":24,"date":"2024-10-23T20:16:18","date_gmt":"2024-10-23T20:16:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/freestyleacademy.rocks\/~MasonS\/?page_id=24"},"modified":"2025-12-06T22:00:41","modified_gmt":"2025-12-06T22:00:41","slug":"reflections","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/freestyleacademy.rocks\/~MasonS\/reflections\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My Personal Mandalas<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

For the Mandala Project, we were tasked to create a mandala using Illustrator which will later be engraved onto a material of our choosing, the goal for this project was to deepen our understanding of Adobe Illustrator. Firstly, we created templates that mirrored each section based on how much “slices” you wish to have on it, then we picked our templates and created our designs, we also had to create a colored version. The black and white version would eventually be engraved, with the colored version being printed on vinyl.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the images do not display below,
On a Mac, press Command + (plus) then press press Command – (minus)
On a PC, press the Ctrl + (plus) then press the Ctrl – (minus)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What were my reactions upon seeing the laser engraved mandala? How well did your physical analog artwork match your imagined digital artwork? Thinking about how simple my mandala is, I was genuinely surprised how much detail was translated from the digital copy and into the engraved version. The black sections engraved on the shiny metallic texture brought out the finer details and enhanced the design. The engraved version of the artwork even better than I imagined how it would look and has more detail than the digital artwork.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I chose metallic plastic for my mandala because I thought it would be the best material for the style I was going for with my design. My design is based on 60s retro-futuristic Spy tech, so the type of material I chose for my mandala fit my design very well and looked very clean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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While this isn’t necessarily different to the BW Mandala in terms of design, I decided to color my mandala based off of the Steam achievement icons you can obtain from the game. The icons typically used three different solid colors (Grey, Orange, and Off-white). With grey being the background, off-white being a secondary background, and orange being miscellaneous, I emulated that style on my mandala to the best of my ability. It isn’t one-to-one to how the colors were arranged on the achievement icons, but still used the exact colors and still is faithful to the source material.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I was first designing the first draft of my mandala, my original plan was to color it similar to the original concept art made for Team Fortress 2, which used Americana pastel artwork. I had to scrap the idea unfortunately due to time and the design being reworked. However, I’m glad that I decided to use the achievement colorway because it fit more in line with the general design I was going for, it also made for a more sleek design that fit better on a smaller canvas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


The Mandala Build Video was the next part of this project right after making the mandala, a “Behind the Scenes” video. I made this video using Adobe After Effects and a bunch of videos of the layers of the mandala stitched together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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