For this assignment it was required for me to create my own personal currency using a mixture of photoshop, illustrator and hand drawn elements. The first step was to pick an architectural structure that hold some type of importance to you and draw it in either one, two, or three point perspective. This was a struggle for me to begin with because there is really no architectural structure that holds some significance to me. So I chose to look into fantasy architecture, and picked the first image and used the pen tool in illustrator to trace over the image, the next step was to integrate the illustrated architecture into your currency. I then began to brainstorm about what I wanted the concept to be about, I was influenced by the wisdom of Buddha so I came up with the name “Buddha Bucks”. The idea behind this was that the money had a symbolic value rather than a numeric values, and the participants using this system of currency would be aiming for self- fulfillment rather trying to acquire money just to by things. When creating this I pictured a society that isn’t affected by the pressures of wealth status, because if everyone is focused on self-fulfillment then wealth in a materialistic point of view is nonexistent and not desired (if that makes sense). I chose to have the face of my abstracted version of a female Buddha, I chose to put a female figure on the front because on American dollars there are no female icons. in illustrator created an abstract guilloche throne that the head is floating on top of to represent a sense of royalty and importance of the female Buddha figure.
For the back I changed the architectural structure that I created in illustrator and instead included a hand drawn image of the world which I then took into photoshop and distorted the channels. for both sides of the currency there are tiny Hamsa hand patterns to represent the blocking of evil energy in the journey of self-fulfillment. There are crescent moons on both sides of the glitched world to represent “growth and to bring forth” the significance of this specific moon phase is to show that growth is possible even though the world has become corrupt. Instead of keeping the fantasy architectural structure I included a Stupa on the back over laying the glitched world. I chose a stupa to show the importance of having a place safe for meditation.
