Sketchbook: Elemental Vitality

Pencil on Bristol board

This is, I say without hesitation, the coolest logo I have ever gotten to design. My husband Seth has spent the past year learning the art of massage therapy, a journey of transformation and awakening. The practice of Zen Shiatsu resonated especially strongly with him, and he wants to focus on bodywork that uses energy and elemental forces to heal.

Shiatsu is based on ancient Chinese medicine, where there are five classical elements - water, wood, fire, earth, and metal. Seth works mostly with the first four, and suggested a logo that incorporated them. I latched on to my love of spiraling, natural formations and drew three separate forms, a water spiral, a wood spiral, and a fire spiral. Merging these in Adobe Photoshop gave me an idea of how they worked together, and I played with color schemes until I got the right mixture of elements.

Back to the drawing board. I printed out the merged drawing I'd created on the computer and used it as a guide for the final artwork. The original concept included only water, wood, and fire, and Seth asked me to add earth as a base, to ground the image. A quick Google search turned up some amazing photos of flowing and cooling lava that worked perfectly with the existing design.

In the weeks to come, I'll color this image and overlay the Chinese characters for the elements it represents.

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