I’ve managed to finish the first four chapters of Adobe Illustrator CS5: Classroom in a Book and managed to rediscover some of the power of Adobe’s vector drawing program. And with the help of YouTube and Adobe TV I’ve managed to recreate this â€?”magical†Taoist mantra from scratch.
It’s certainly not the same as drawing with pen and pencil, something I haven’t done since grad school, but it does seem qualitatively different from adjusting photographs in Photoshop.
I did get a creative rush when I finally managed to create the central yin-yang symbol with some of the powerful new tools in CS5. It took awhile longer to discover how to rotate figures around a central point. I think I just rediscovered my INTP self!
Of course, it’s impossible now to recreate a symbol like this without searching the internet for the meaning of what you’ve been working on. Though I’m not really into astrology, much less Feng Shui, I did find this explanation of the yin-yang symbol interesting.