Reflections Project Introduction
Introduction to Reflections Project
My Personal Mandalas
paragraph intro about the mandalaproject
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)
BW and Laser Engraved Mandala
When I first saw my laser engraved mandala, it was actually still in the process of being made, so I was mostly shocked about how the machine engraved out the pizza board. I believe that this artwork matched how I created it digitally perfectly, since it being engraved into wood was mostly how I was imagining it in my head.
I decided to choose the pizza board for my material of choice since it was the prettiest to me. The slice of wood was a close runner up for me, but I had a phase where I used to paint those slices of wood and I believed my mandala would shine the most engraved on the pizza board. Throughout the whole mandala process, I mostly just enjoyed making all the symmetrical shapes. I never had an idea of what I wanted to do, or what theme I would follow, I simply let my artistic creativity reign free. Mostly, I enjoyed working with the black strokes better than only color because when I began coloring I had to sacrifice the unique brush I’d used for all my lines and swapped it out with the basic circle brush. Overall, I’m really proud of how I was able to tell a story from my drawings, since I never even meant to tell a story in the first place.
This project taught me a few new tools in Adobe Illustrator that I’m excited to use in the future, that being the symmetry effect. It also helped me hone my Illustrator abilities more, which is good. I can’t really stress how much I didn’t know what I was going to do before this project, but I’m glad that working on it has helped me know more about myself in a weird way, since I don’t let my creativity take hold without meaning (like how I did with this mandala) as often as I usually would as a kid.
Colored and Sublimation Mandala
For this piece I didn’t stray far from my BW Mandala design wise, but I did have to remove some smaller details which made it hard for me to color everything. Getting to see the final printed colored mandala was way different then seeing the wooden one, the colors give the mandala a whole different vibe of how I saw it in my head.
Originally, I just took a variety of colors off of the internet in order to use in my mandala. Later on I unintentionally chose only a specific range of colors, which reminded me of the colors used on real Parol’s in the Philippines. The colors I used ended up expressing my view of home. Working with color was a little difficult, especially when I had to rearrange the line art of the mandala to make something work. But, I think it really allowed me to show more of my original vision for the art piece.
I’m surprised at how everything looks all together, I was worried that my colors would clash with one another but all of them perfectly stand out from one another. Through this project, I can apply some of the effect tricks that I learned in Illustrator to other projects I might work on in the future.