Vision Journal Collective: June : Be relaxed with mandalas

One of the temptations of summer is to fill all those extra hours of light with being busy. What I’d like to suggest this summer is that you make sure you take time for yourself. Be creative (if it calls to you). I can’t help but be creative. I get a little bit twitchy if I’m too far from my art supplies and have even been known to sneak out and find an art supply store while I’m traveling.

Ideally, you will find the branch of creativity that feeds your soul and you will do that whenever and wherever you feel moved to do so. It might be journaling, it might not. It might be knitting or painting or beekeeping.

My goal for teaching this class has always been to introduce you to a range of things I find interesting so you can decide if they fit into your life. I won’t be the least bit offended if you don’t pick up your journal again till September, but I hope you do.

As we head into summer, I thought I’d share with you two of the most relaxing art practices out there. First up: Mandalas. I always thought they were difficult and complicated till I took a one-hour online class and learned that I was delightfully wrong.

Many mandalas are based on concentric circles which have then been divided up into wedges with straight lines all passing through the center of the circle.

First, create a “skeleton”, a series on concentric circles divided into segments, all drawn very lightly in pencil. Do this by placing the point of your compass roughly in the middle of your paper and drawing a large outer circle. Then keeping the compass point in the same place, draw additional smaller circles inside the first one.
To create wedges, draw line “A” horizontally across your circle, passing through the same center point.
Using the protractor, draw a vertical line at 90 degrees to the first line (line “B” on the diagram).
Continue to divide up the circle using the protractor. The diagram I’ve shown continues to divide each section in half until I have 16 equal wedges. Here’s something to think about: the more segments you have, the more complex your mandala will be when you’re done.

Now that you’ve got your “skeleton” in place, you can start adding detail and pattern!

Add detail by drawing lines (straight or curvy) that connect “intersections” together. An intersection is any place where a wedge line crosses a circle line.
The important thing is to *repeat* the line around the circle drawing the same line over and over, as shown in the diagrams below.
You can be as precise or as relaxed as you’d like to be, but the more consistent you are with your lines, the more consistent your mandala will be.
The diagrams below show some ideas for different kinds of connections to make.

These connections are made by a simple line from an intersection on one circle to a different intersection on another circle.
Notice that the lines are all going the same direction - I'm just turning the circle and repeating the same line.

On this example, I'm creating MIRROR IMAGES of my connecting lines, but still moving around the circle.
If I make my lines rounded, I create a petal effect. If I make my lines straight, I get points instead.

In this example, I'm adding small circles and curved arcs to add visual interest around the edges of the circle.

One of my favourite ways to create a mandala is by zigzagging back and forth from the center to the outside of the circle. The result can be quite interesting, even while the lines are simple. Here's one of my mandalas drawn that way:

When you colour this kind of mandala, you can get something quite striking. Here's another version of the same idea:

I should point out that all the mandalas I've drawn above are on pre-printed "skeletons" so you can see the structure of the circles still in them. When you're drawing your own mandalas, you'd be drawing in pencil, so you would erase out the pencil lines once you've finished drawing your pattern.

I'll put some pre-drawn mandala skeletons at the bottom of this post, but I wanted to show you a few variations of mandalas I've drawn so you can see the rules for mandalas can be quite flexible:

This mandala has very simple lines radiating out in only one direction, but I've added a face in the center and teardrops to make it look more like a sun.

You can move the center "off center" if you like and be more fluid with your lines. This mandala was drawn entirely freehand - no rulers involved! I drew a large circle and then an offset inner circle and just went for it - I wanted to make something that looked like a sunflower head.

This mandala started off without any lines in the center at all. I started by just drawing the straight lines to make points using a ruler, then joined up the inner line ends with curving lines. I wish I could tell you that I was a *genius* and totally planned that they'd all connect up perfectly, but the truth is I just didn't know how it would turn out. The math gods must have really been with me on this one! I thought it looked too spiky when it was done, so I added a ring of tiny circles between the ends of the points all around the outside edge and then coloured them in the order of the colours on the spectrum, and painted the points pretty much at randomly. This is one of my all-time favourite very happy accidents of not planning anything at all.

If you're looking for a good book on mandalas, I'd recommend Kathryn Costa's Mandala Guidebook. It's wide-ranging, colourful and very inspiring, with lots of variations to work with using lots of different materials. Kathryn has info and resources on her website that are worth a look as well.