Mandalas and Me

I had a moment at work over last summer where I said the most artist-y thing I could imagine myself ever saying. “Oh yeah, I’ve been kinda getting into circles.”

It was just the funniest thing, in hindsight at least! Who doesn’t like circles?

But a couple days ago, I came across the make I was working on in that moment, and it prompted me to think over my connection… with circles.

When I was young my parents would bring us to art museums with sketchbooks and colored pencils, so I did a lot of (what would now be considered) abstract art. They weren’t all recognizable.

My uncle had made what I would call “Doodle Art” for my grandmother when I was in elementary school, so by the time I hit middle school I was doodling in the margins of my math work… Sorry math teachers!

I just pulled out some of my sketchbooks from high school, and I found some cool squiggle doodles I was working on back then, so I have proof that I was doing circular-ish stuff back then!

Then when I was in college something magical happened. I was introduced to mandalas in a spectacular way! My college invited a group of Buddhist nuns to our campus to make a sand mandala.

Every day or two I would stop into the black box theater on campus to watch the incredibly intricate mandala develop and to watch the thought and the concentration that these nuns put into this beautiful work. Even though I missed the organized events due to school and work, I felt connected to the mandala every time I took off my shoes to pad into the theater and observe the work as it progressed.

Alright, let’s cut to April 2017, when I desperately needed to make a wedding gift for May, and I decided I would laser cut coasters, but then the question became, “What am I going to put on the coasters?”

Pinterest did not let me down, and I saw so many cool ideas, but the mandalas stood out to me. And that was when I started to draw my own!

For most of the time since then, I’ve drawn in an eighth or sixteenth of a circle pie slice, then taken a picture of it,  and redrew the entire thing in Illustrator.

When my pie slice was drawn up, I’d then flip and rotate and flip and rotate (etc) until I had a full mandala. There might be a little bit of clean up, or combining of paths and such, and then I had a finished design!

I’ve put these digital mandalas on coasters, on ornaments, on magazine boxes that I use for organization, on digital websites for downloads, on coloring pages for download at my Etsy shop, and most recently on fabric!

About a month and a half ago, I decided it was time to try doing these mandalas by hand, just like the nuns I had observed six years before (except… with paper and pen instead of sand). I bought myself this compass, which is weighty and will accept a mechanical pencil or slimmer, and used a protractor, and so far I’ve drawn about 10 entirely by hand!

Here’s a couple videos to show you my sketching, inking, and coloring process!

So saying, “I’ve kinda been getting into circles!” is not true… It looks like I’ve been loving circles for a long time!