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 “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.