Series 5 - Mandalas (AKA the class before the last class)

We're coming to the end of our current series of classes. By class request this week we explored the practice of drawing mandalas.

Mandala is a Sanskrit word meaning “circle”. Traditionally, it’s a spiritual and ritual symbol commonly used in Indian religions to represent the Universe. But mandalas are cross-cultural. They’ve also been used in Tibetan meditations, the rose windows of Gothic cathedrals and Aztec calendar stones. 

There are also many beautiful natural “mandalas” in the world around us: flower heads, sliced vegetables, tree rings, seashells, snowflakes, cacti and seed pods, for example.

Carl Jung drew, and had his patients make, drawings similar to mandalas noting that these “small circular drawings ... seemed to correspond to my inner situation at the time. Only gradually did I discover what the mandala really is: the Self, the wholeness of the personality, which if all goes well, is harmonious.”

The mandala has also become a widely-used art therapy tool, for its usefulness in promoting calmness, allowing focus, creativity, relaxation and mindfulness.

Drawing a mandala can be a relaxation exercise. It’s very soothing to make a simple line and relax into drawing its repetitions around the circle. It gives you a chance to calm down, breathe deeply and unplug from whatever chatter is going on in your head. It’s surprising how even a few simple lines can eventually turn into a complex beautiful design through the act of repetition.

Below are four mandalas I’ve drawn to show you some options for drawing. (You'll find these mandalas in black and white for you to colour on the handouts). If you feel like you can't draw, you can also make mandalas by arranging repeated shapes cut from coloured paper or even magazine images.

In the first mandala - Folk Art Sun - I drew a whimsical folk art face in the center, and then drew a long curving line going out all the way to the edge, then I mirror-imaged that line from the outside, but stopped the line where it met the edge of the next long line. I filled in the empty spaces in the rays with smaller rays. You might notice I drew the lines in such a way that it would make a good picture to colour. I coloured this one with pencil crayons.

For the second mandala - Atomic Crown - I used a ruler to draw the points first. I started with 8 long points, which look like a compass and its directions (north, south, east, west, etc). Then I divided the space between the points in half with another set of points, and then another set in the halfway spaces again. I wanted to add something different on the outside edge, so I used the little hole in the end of the ruler for tiny circles between the tips of all the points. The center curved lines were added using a yogurt container lid. When it came time to colour this one, I used water-soluble crayons (Neocolor II - my favourite). I started by painting the little circles on the outside edge according to the spectrum. Then I painted the point a contrasting colour and overlapped them in the center.

The third mandala - Sunflower Head - is to show you can set the "center" of your mandala off-center. I drew everything in pencil first. I drew long sweeping curves from the center out to the edge, not worrying about when and where they crossed. I wanted it to be free-flowing and organic. After I'd gone all the way around, I filled in the spaces between with more curving lines and little flame shapes. I added tiny dots in the center to make it more interesting. Again, I painted with Neocolor IIs, treating the, more like watercolour paints and letting the colours flow freely over the lines at times.

The last mandala - Tree of Life, I started by drawing the trunk first, vertical and roughly in the center, then I drew loose organic lines going out from the bottom as roots, and up to the top as branches. When I liked what I'd drawn, I added leaves and grass. This one I coloured with felt pens.

If being mathematically perfect isn't your thing, you can draw lovely relaxed floral mandalas like the one below, using the instructions as shown and a series of flourishes, leaves and dots. Notice how I didn't worry about "perfection". Nature is very forgiving that way .. 

Unless you're drawing something completely freehand (as above), the first thing you need for drawing a mandala is a "framework" to draw on. I call these "skeletons". Usually, they consist of a set of concentric circles and a set of lines radiating out from the center point of the circles. Like this:

These would normally be drawn very faintly in pencil and then you'd erase them after your mandala is drawn. Feel free to print out the skeleton above as a starting point till you draw your own.

To draw a mandala, there are three things you need to remember:

1. You draw lines (straight or curved) from an intersection on one circle to an intersection on another circle. An INTERSECTION is wherever a line crosses a circle.
2. When you've drawn your line, you rotate the circle and repeat the same line on the next segment over.
3. You create new intersections as you add lines. You can use these new intersections as endpoints for new lines, and so on. In the diagram below, the dark line is the first line I drew and the dotted lines are how I would continue all the way around the circle. On the bottom edge, you can see that I used a line I'd drew as a place to end another line instead of going all the way to the lines on the skeleton.

For more detail, please refer to the handout sheets at the bottom of this post. If they don't print out clearly enough for you, please contact me and I will email you a pdf for you to print out.

Other things worth thinking about when drawing a mandala:

• Your lines can be curved or straight, freehand or with a ruler or guide. 
• You can even place shapes on top into your design as well, like in the Atomic Crown Mandala I drew above where I used the hole in the ruler to make a pattern of little circles between the points. Below is an image showing straight and curved lines, and shapes all together:

• Your lines can be mirror-imaged. If you look at the small lines at the bottom of the diagram above, you might notice that the shortest line is a mirror-image of line it's attached to, together they form a little point or petal. Below is a diagram of how you can use mirror-imaging to form petals and points in your mandalas:

During class, we all created a mandala by drawing the same lines in the same order. In the diagram below I've shown what "path" of the lines we drew would look like. We started at the center and worked our way to the outside. Two things to notice: the inside set of petals is created by mirror-imaging the line next to it and then turning towards the dots we drew but STOPPING when we reached the line. Secondly, the outside row of petals was made by dividing the outside circle in half and them imitating the petal just below it:

 And here's the design drawn all the way around the circle:

Below is a very similar mandala, but now coloured. I wanted to point out my colour choices. I chose blue/purple alternating for the petals, which gives a beautiful spiral effect. To balance the blue/purple, I chose yellow/orange for everything else to increase the contrast. I'm sure you're all tired of me talking about the colour wheel, but this combination works because blue and purple are NEXT to each other on the colour wheel. Yellow and orange are also NEXT to each other on the colour wheel, but the two sets of colours are OPPOSITE each other, so you get maximum visual interest. 

If you want the touch of a mandala on your page, but don't want to draw the whole thing, you can draw a curve on the edge of your page and by imagining what's not there, draw only the portion that would fall on the page, like I do here:

Well, I feel I've gone on long enough about mandalas! I encourage you to practice drawing mandalas, it truly is amazing how simple it is to make a gorgeous design. I'll post the handouts below, and if you can't print them out clearly, contact me and I will send you the pdf. 

We have one more class in this series, which will be on May 23rd, and then we are off til September. Next class we'll be talking about staying connected to your creativity over the summer. Hope to see you then!