Graphic Design - "Elemental Prism" Limited Edition Print Series

Sacred geometry ascribes symbolic and sacred meanings to specific geometric shapes and proportions. This has ancient roots and takes many compelling forms in Buddhism, Chinese spiritual traditions, Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity. Plutarch attributed the belief to Plato, writing, "Plato said God geometrizes continually." The science doesn't work, of course, but it is beautiful.

“This is prophesy, not prediction. This is the I Ching; it's beautiful, but it's not scientific.” –Jin Cheng, The Three Body Problem

Platonic Solids

One of my favorite forms of Sacred Geometry involves the platonic solids-tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron. Their namesake, Plato, associated the first four geometric shapes with one of the four classic elements: fire, earth, air, and water. From wikipedia:

Earth was associated with the cube, air with the octahedron, water with the icosahedron, and fire with the tetrahedron. Of the fifth Platonic solid, the dodecahedron, Plato obscurely remarked, "...the god used [it] for arranging the constellations on the whole heaven". Aristotle added a fifth element, aither (aether in Latin, "ether" in English) and postulated that the heavens were made of this element, but he had no interest in matching it with Plato's fifth solid.

Reading about these ancient great thinkers and how their reach exceeded their grasp was inspiring. I embarked on creating a series of limited-run screen prints and complementary digital art.

Full-color digital art representations were made using vector graphics of the platonic solids and stock images sourced from Unsplash. Each of these must be converted to single-color images for screen printing.

Screen Printing

For the uninitiated, in the traditional screen printing process, each individual color requires the creation of a new physical screen through which the ink is pressed onto a medium, creating the "print." Using even a few colors becomes prohibitively expensive in small-scale production.

This constraint forced me to expand my creative skills, which was a big part of the appeal of this project. I still often use halftone bitmaps in my design projects. See Seek HiFi. The vibe is appealing to me. Halftone screen effects are a novel way to reduce file sizes while preserving enough detail for viewers to fill in the blanks as their minds apply gestalt principles automatically.

To preserve the depth and texture of my elemental prism digital art, I used the original concept art and generated halftone screen images as black-and-white bitmap files. Applying a single color to each, I was able to generate these mock-ups.

Once I had satisfactory mock-ups, I worked with Dan Padavic, the owner of Vahalla Studios in Kansas City. Vahalla is an expert in flat stock screen printing and letterpress. Dan has probably forgotten more about traditional printing methods than I will ever know. He was an amazing partner in this project and worked hard to get everything exactly how I wanted it.

Dan helped me with file formats, and we went through dozens of test prints and colors. As a creative professional, I know how taxing it can be to work with a client on your shoulder, and they had me in the shop pulling stock and mixing colors. I could not have asked for more.

I ended up with 100 numbered 18x24 inch prints of each element. These were sold online in a SquareSpace store under a "Platonic Press" brand I created. I just about broke even. I sold other prints under this label, but that's a different story. I held back a few sets for myself. One is hanging in my dining room.

Digital Art

During this time, I also made digital art to accompany the screen prints. Bits are cheaper than ink, paper, machine time, and labor. Why not?

The images in these galleries are full-size and free to download for personal use.

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This project had me exploring new mediums and stretching my creative legs. I also made a tremendous local connection with a true expert craftsman. Finally, in my research, I learned something new about human history and our amazing drive to assign meaning to the universe and explain the unexplainable. Whether it's a story, principle, or set of laws that describe our world, no matter how flawed, we all just gotta make stuff.