Simple Systems, a Revision

I have reimagined the concept from my previous painting that failed in execution. Today, I painted from 10am-7pm, plus ~3 hours of "post-production" (and touch-ups). In other creative news, Next in Fashion Season 2 is back, and I am loving it.

Concept summary: This painting is about foundations. Six elements in six foundational categories: natural elements, types of intelligences, life purposes, basic emotions, the six quarks and fun punctuations (not a foundation). I noticed midway that this resembles a subway line map, but I think it works because subways are underground where foundations are. 😂

Overall assessment: I had a great time with the entire process; top 3 paintings in terms of enjoyment, a sign of personal growth.
-The visual concept came to me quickly, which is a phenomenon that always surprises me. This painting is a callback to my flower maze painting and my core style, being less abstract than my recent ones.
-A couple points of self-critique: I prefer the more organic feel of my original sketch, where I had looser lines that didn't align perfectly to a grid format. I didn't know how to recreate that in a painting.
-I also made a calculation error and added an extra row about 1/3 down. I could have used that extra space in the bottom instead. While at first this seemed like a major miss, it's more like a "happy little accident" looking at it now. 

All of these shortcomings can be attributed to lack of formal artistic study and also trying to go fast. But issues aside, I'm feeling less regret than I usually do. 8.5/10

Detailed commentary:
-The line colors are based on my iPad Notability palette, which I spent some time perfecting a while back, so it was nice to get more mileage from that.
-I tried not to overthink the icons, and just set the bar at elegantly simple but not too tropey. I redid an icon, so the old version is on my Insta and the new version is below. There were a couple other small details I didn't/forgot to optimize for (order of icons, which line goes on top).
-Noting that I needed to force-fit six elements per category. In particular, there are commonly eight intelligences, which I find to be excessive/indulgent anyway.

-Also noting I included the quarks category because I read about them in a book a long time ago and they fit the theme perfectly, but I fundamentally don’t know what quarks are.

Here’s the full log —
-Teal line (natural elements): fire, water, air, wood, stone, plants
-Magenta line (intelligences): musical, logical, linguistic (mountain ie storytelling), relational, kinesthetic (sock), visual (squiggly)
-Lime green line (typical life purposes): for the moment, for growth/change, for influence, for knowledge/wisdom (notebook), for recognition (medal), for morality/deontological
-Wine red line (basic emotions): happy, sad, angry (brick), afraid (monster in the dark), disgust, surprise
-Blue line (punctuations): asterisk, and, quotes, colon, bracket, degree
-Gold line (quarks): top, bottom, charm, strange, top, bottom

Original sketch

Epilogue: 

Thought #1

It occurred to me that I could have included seven deadly sins or seven senses (incl. balance and body awareness), perhaps instead of the punctuations. However, Sins seem to be quite similar to life purposes, and Senses are quite overlapping with intelligences. So that’s interesting

Thought #2

As a significant part of art is about expressing your style, the self-expression that I express today is structured thinking and colorfulness. Self-expression is very life-giving actually. It was on my long list of life purposes that I attempted to distill in a MECE way, and I think it is some combo of "growth" and "recognition".