Mandalas

Last year my friend told me about an on-line Mini-class called 5 days of Mandala from Julie Gibbons. I used to draw or just colour in Mandalas what seems now like ages ago 🙂 And so I was very interested and happily joined in. At the end we were invited to join year long journey about artful self discovery through the magic circle of Mandala. And as this year is about myself and self discovery, this class just perfectly fitted into my plan for this year.

I have started doodling some circles over the Christmas using different pens or paints and exploring both – the shape of a circle, and my art materials, which some of them I have had for quite some time and didn’t use them much.

One day I was using Gesso for something which is to used to treat canvas and make it ready to paint on … and suddenly an idea came … what if I paint the Gesso onto ordinary fabric and add colour – in my case by using Inktense blocks – which are water soluble, but once wetted they are permanent. So I tried this to create a nice background and then I inserted water soluble pen into my compass, draw basic shapes of Mandala and took the whole piece under the machine and “HAD A BALL” It was so enjoyable to stitch the shapes!! I made one little one before Christmas and covered a small notepad with it and gave it to Olivier’s mum for Christmas and couple of days ago I made larger one, also as a present for a friend who helped me a lot before Christmas.

I also took my fabric paints and added some details and filled some shapes with those. For the larger one I have placed two half circles onto the fabric as I like the idea of the circles not being there full, but coming off the edge of the book cover.