I have a couple prayer plants that I placed together in the same pot - an older plainer looking mother plant and a recently acquired spiffy looking pretty one. It was looking sunny the other day so I took this photo thinking about starting an art project. The plants kind of remind me of my left hand and my right hand and putting them together in the pot just makes it special.
I wanted to do some type of vector art so I drafted up a simple geometric pattern for some practice work with Inkscape. I’m ambidextrous but I like to doodle with my left hand so it came out kind of sloppy and sloping to the left. I figured I would just clean it up in the vector program. (The scan from the phone software made it look even worse than it was.)
When I started working in Inkscape I kind of liked the uneven look of the placement. When I created the graphic I left it that way but cleaning up some of the lines. Some symbols have so much history with a right side up star meaning one thing and upside down one meaning another - pentagons and regular patterns all have some meaning. I liked the rustic look - a five pointed star doesn’t need to toe the line imho.
I wanted the center to be kind of special. It reminds me of both hands coming together yet not being really of either hand. (Kind of a koan if you think about it, like whats the sound of one hand clapping, lol)
I imported the svg vector file into Blender and made a 3D obj file to use in Sculptris. Both of these are free programs you might want to try. I wanted to make a raised spiral in 3D because lots of things are in spirals like, worms, snail shells, galaxies, etc.
If you try Sculptris a word of caution, it can be very finicky to run, you should save often. It is native to Windows but will run under Linux Ubuntu if you use Wine. (It can get even more buggy running under Linux though.) I wanted to use it because it has some easy to use materials that make gold look really cool.
I thought the center should be gold because – well, gold is cool. It takes many years to make – it is the product big enormous stars exploding - that kind of thing…
Combining things together I made this graphic which I liked:
I thought I would add it to the original picture but I wanted it in the center of the plant and it didn’t fit too well. So I scanned a leaf separately to put in the foreground. It came out showing all the cells if you look closely. This was taken with my cellphone.
Adding the leaf picture made it so I could make the graphic a nice size. I kind of liked the results but the background was getting too distracting and busy looking.
So I added some blur to the background and made this picture which I liked a bit better. It reminds me a bit of a praying mantis mandala waiting patiently on a leaf for some rouge prayers to drift past. When someone prays for victory in battle or something like that, the prayer just sticks in the mantis and goes ‘poof’, lol. (Just kidding)
The final picture turned out like this. I used DAPainter to give it some more uniformity. I really like this program and I might upgrade it. I works great under Linux even though it is a Windows program.
The left hand that touches the right hand are both by nature empty
Thanks for reading! As always your support is greatly appreciated!