Alright, today I messed around with something called “hexagram 26”, which sounds way more complicated than it actually is. I started by just looking it up, like anyone would, and found out it’s from that old Chinese book, the I Ching. This hexagram is all about holding back, or as they put it, “the taming power of the great”. Sounds intense, right?
Getting Started
So, I thought, how can I get this thing to show up on my computer? First, I needed to figure out how these hexagrams are built. Turns out, they’re made up of six lines, each either solid or broken. A solid line is like a “yes” and a broken line is a “no”. For hexagram 26, it goes solid, broken, broken, then three solids. Easy enough.
Drawing the Lines
Next, I had to actually draw these lines. I figured the simplest way was to use dashes for solid lines and a dash with a space in the middle for the broken ones. I started with a plain text editor, just typing them out:
- -- -
Okay, that looked about right. But I wanted to make it a bit fancier.
Making it Look Nice
I decided to use a basic drawing tool to make the lines look a bit more polished. I drew a solid rectangle for the solid lines, and for the broken lines, I drew two smaller rectangles with a gap in the middle. I lined them up just like I typed them out before. This took a bit of fiddling to get the spacing right, but it ended up looking pretty good.
Putting It All Together
Finally, I had my visual representation of hexagram 26. It wasn’t perfect, but it was definitely recognizable. I saved the image and thought, “Hey, this could be a cool graphic for a blog post or something.” And that’s pretty much it. I took something that seemed complicated at first and broke it down into simple steps. It was a fun little project, and now I have a neat little hexagram image to show for it.
