Actual Content? Who would've guessed...

                Well, for today’s post, I’d thought I’d include actual content for once. What better than to go over the design process for these weird pieces I create? For today we’re going to address a piece I recently remade and have featured on this site and a few others before in its original form. This is by no means a step by step tutorial, but rather a survey of what is going through my mind and, more importantly, what the significance of and inspiration for this art is.

Original Piece

                To begin, a little background on my design philosophy. For years now I’ve had a strong interest in esoteric religion from both the east and the west and, to anyone with even cursory exposure to those schools of thinking, the inspiration from it seeping into the pieces I create is quite obvious. When the original of this piece was made a few years ago I drew heavily from the east through Hindu yantras, mandalas, and especially the rangoli, which I was recently exposed to at the time. And it is such that, when I began working on what would become this piece, I worked towards designing my very own “rangoli” that was not so much intended for religious purposes but more so to be an original work of art. As we move further on, I will explain in more precise terms where exactly this influence is apparent.

                My recreation of the piece began where most of anything I can muster up the pride to call “art” begins, Autodesk AutoCAD software (which, to any of you reading this that is a student, instructor, or has qualifying unemployment, can be downloaded for free.) The design, on the most basic level, is taken from the “DurgaYantra.” The traditional design consists of eight petals surrounding concentric circles within which is a geometric pattern comprised of overlapping triangles. I much enjoy the aesthetics of straight lines and sharp corners, and, as such, I converted the petals into the “sides” of an irregular octagon. The original “triangle pattern” is not present but was the inspiration for the four sets of three triangles that can be seen pointing inward, in reference to the inner self, in the final design. In a similar disregard for tradition, I took the concentric circles normally around the geometry in the yantra and instead moved them within it. It is in these circles I made a quasi-mandala. Between the two rings are sixteen triangles as a representation of and to honor Vishuddha, which is represented with a sixteen petalled lotus flower and is the seat of creativity in humans. In the original design, the interior geometry had no real significance. It existed to occupy the center area and reference the representations of chakras containing simple symbolic shapes within the larger “lotus” representation of the chakra. I wanted to give the new design some significance, and the final geometry I settled on was a symmetrical set of polygons seeming to point upwards and downwards in reference to hermetic philosophy (“As is Above, So is Below.”)

AutoCAD 2013 outline of the design

                With the geometry done, it is time to add color. I begin by exporting the file from AutoCAD into Paint.net (a free photoshop like program for windows users) and contemplating what palette I’m going to use and to what effect. As an individual I much enjoy the process of creating the geometry of these pieces, coloring a piece attractively, however, often takes me quite a bit of time and effort as I can rarely discover a pattern or series of patterns I believe looks good. I try to take a systematic approach, usually, and for both the original and redone design I again took inspiration from the chakras. Specifically their representative colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. To determine the placement of these colors, however, I was both intentional and arbitrary. The intentional placement is indigo and violet (representative of the highest chakras) being in the very center and “at the top of the steps” in the outer parts of the design. Red, similarly, was purposely placed on the outer edge of the design due to its representation of the lowest chakra. Vishuddha is referenced a second time in the palette. Specifically in the palette itself being heavily biased towards blue, Vishuddha’s color. On the arbitrary side of my choices, orange and yellow were placed between the center rings because I thought it broke up the predominantly blue palette attractively. Then, as an extension, green was made the dominant color between the rings and central geometry since I figured it was the most logical placement, being that the center was very blue biased and the rings were very yellow biased. For most of my pieces I use gradients as I find them aesthetically preferable to solid colors or hatches.

               With the coloration done, the piece is mostly finished. With pieces I’ve created in AutoCAD I often add just a little bit of Gaussian blur at the end to remove any jaggedness that’s present in the outline as well as to “flatten out” the gradients and give it, what I think is, a sleek, sharp, more modern feel that I like and that I think separates what I create from a lot of art in this style that is, often times, more focused on recreating antiquity. And now that I am preparing these pieces for public consumption, I usually add the name of either myself or the title of this blog somewhere on the piece. Below is the final coloring. I call it the "Rangoli of Enoch."