Ninth Circle Design

The perils of ancient software

I mentioned in my last post that I found some lovely tutorials on the internet for making mandalas with Illustrator.  There’s one catch – they’re all for much newer versions than I’m using.  While one might think that this wouldn’t be such a problem, oh yes, it turns out to be one.

You can even see it in the mudpie in that last post – there’s an unintentional overlap along the edges of the wedges where it repeats.

If it works, it’s not a trick

With the help of my favorite librarian, I was finally able to get that resolved and everything lining up properly.

Which means I’m on to creating the second one. :) Here’s a sample of it so far:

A small sample

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In Which I Get In A Rut

It turns out that having a small creature in your life makes it a lot harder to do art.  Everything’s fine as long as I’m up and moving about, but sitting down to do, well, anything, is an invitation to be climbed upon and generally interfered with.

… and Try to Get Back Out

After a few months of spending more time on social media than I should probably admit to and playing a lot more games than I want to admit to, because the phone doesn’t spark the same level of interference, I went looking for something different.  Something calming and mellow, not a game that would keep me looping over and over, something artistic but not seriously so.

In the end, I stumbled upon a decent, free app for making mandalas.

This was good, because I made a few ones I liked (I posted a few on The Social Medias).  This was also less good fairly quickly, because I rapidly discovered the boundaries of what I could do with it.

You Know Where This Is Going 

I’ve seen mandalas on RedBubble and suchlike, and I’ve seen tutorials for them on the internets, so surely they can’t be that hard!

Oh, I am so optimistic sometimes.

Trying to do them by hand proved … painfully bad.  Lopsided, awkward, lumpy.  I’m sure that, given a few years and maybe some polar coordinates paper (say, from Incompetech) and several more hours in the day of time to work, I might someday turn out adequate, mediocre mandalas by hand.

Instead, realizing how unlikely that was, I went hunting YouTube tutorials on doing them the easy way with Illustrator.

Here’s my first attempt:

This is the mudpie of mandalas

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