The Mandala | Adobe Illustrator Adventures with Anu ~ Blue Eye Candy

It took me four days. My routine was the same for all of the days. Wake up. Walk the dogs. Have breakfast. And when the clock strikes ten, open Illustrator, and select a brush to help me draw the mandala.

I had saved dagubi's tutorial on 'How to Create a Lace Pattern in Adobe Illustrator,' to my Graphic Design Pet Projects Playlist on YouTube and it had already been around ten days since I had saved it.

It was time.

It was time for me to stop putting it away for another day and just watch it and... DO SOMETHING! Mostly because I needed to keep my promise to this blog.

For the uninitiated, this blog should have an article uploaded to it every Saturday. Period. No Excuses. That was the promise I made with this blog in my very first article.

Because: 1. I want to become an Illustrator. 2. I'm weird.

But, as is the case every time when I 'embark' on a new journey of some kind, things seldom go as planned. (I know some of you can relate to it.) And Blue Eye Candy is not an exception.

It's been almost a month since I rambled on something about being 'in love' with flat drawings. My future self always recoils when reading my blog posts. (Hey, future self!) Not a whole lot of you had read my previous article, so it was kind of relieving, to be honest. ('Hey' to those who write something but don't want to read it ever again. Or have it read by the whole wide world. Nobody? Okay.)

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Thirty minutes is a REALLY long time to be squinting your eyes and watching a tutorial where the tutor is drawing intricate patterns - which, when you try to replicate, turns out looking nothing like it.

But I went through it. For four days. By the time I had completed it, my toenails had grown 2 inches longer and I had forgotten that I was suffocating my derriere.

And my mandala looked nothing like the one in the tutorial - which can sometimes be a good thing. I always try not to copy a tutorial from A to Z. Instead, I try to make it look different. On purpose. Sometimes it works. And sometimes, it doesn't.

This time around, while creating the mandala, it actually worked! Apart from a few errors here and there, that is. They weren't visible in the final piece, but, oh well, the truth is:

The more I tried fixing them, the more my mandala started skewing.

So I decided to just embrace all the errors and just...let them be. Because nothing in this world is perfect. So my mandala needn't be; it didn't have to try to become the mandala in the tutorial; it accepted the way it is. It was, for the very first time, happy to be himself. Imperfect and skewed.

Okay, I'll stop.

That was a weird monologue.

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To those who managed to read all of the above: Congratulations! You get a free video tour of my mandala. Just scroll to the bottom.

To those who just couldn't get through the first few sentences: Congratulations! It' the best decision you've ever made in your life! And you, also, get a free video tour of my mandala!

Because my mandala needs attention. No matter who or what you are. :D

I know. None of you asked for any of this, but I just had to flaunt my mandala and do a video-shoot for it - I'm sorry - 'him.' We've been calling this guy 'it' all through this article. :O

'Dear Mandala, I give you life. From henceforth, you shall be called Mandy. Mandy the Mandala.'

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Before this article gets any more weirder, let me just show the thing that you came here for. Let me present to you: The Birth of Mandy. In pictures.

This is how he looks today. He's four days old in this picture.