Note: this method was taught by art teacher Gianna Bird. You can look her up on eventbrite (link below) to learn from her in the future classes.
For drawing mandalas, I had been relying on internet. One of the sources had been Lax Lifestyle youtube channel (link below), She had amazing mandala videos which can be put in slow speed and copy.
With probably enough practice there will probably come a day where one can draw their own mandalas.
However when Gianna showed us a method of ‘Draw your own mandala’ I was excited to learn the method – because you can be an artist anywhere with this method. Here are the basic steps to create your own mandala. the steps look long, but it is like the hand washing tutorial. When you see a hand washing tutorial, it looks 10 min long, but we can wash our hands in 20 sec. Likewise, the steps seem long here, but if you practice even once, the condense down and makes it one of the easier methods to draw your own mandala.
Step 1:
- Draw a bunch of squares: 6 to 9 squares would work. (images, coming soon)
Step 2: Source of shapes
- Pick any source of shapes, it can be from pictures in a magazine, or if you are outside, look around at the shapes near you. or if you are indoors, same recommendation.
Step 3: Take a minutia of what you see
- E.g. 1. if you are looking at a flower, it has multiple shapes in that. A circle in the middle, surrounded by oval shape petals, or circle shape petals eltc.
- Pick a shape – and put it in the box. If you like both shapes, put one shape in each box.
- Now you have two boxes filled with circle and oval shape.
- Continue to capture all the tiny shapes in each box.
- E.g 2. If you are looking at a book, then square or rectangle shape.
- Sanitizer bottle (hello, that is where we are) then circle (top of bottle) and probably cylinder shape.
Step 4: Draw concentric circles.
- Because art has no mistakes you can do this by hand
- or use a helper device like protractor or use bottle caps and circles formed by cello-tapes etc.
- using any of the devices, draw concentric circles.
- I use pencil for this so that I can erase them after they are done
Step 5: Now the fun part
- Use the shapes you created in Step 3 and put them in the concentric circle.
- E.g in the first circle put the tiny circles
- second circle fill it up with tiny cylinders
- Keep going and fill each circle with the shapes you have captured in step 3.
- Voila your own mandala is picture perfect ready.
Tips:
- practice makes progress. Hence if the first time you try this, if it looks like you bumped your ink stained face on to paper, don’t worry, this is your first masterpiece. There are no mistakes in art. Keep trying and keep drawing.
- if you notice the lines are shaky, one tip that helps is to draw slowly with patience and mindfulness and possibly meditatively.
- Try not to compare with what is online. Remember they have done years of practice before they put their work online. This is your first masterpiece. It is not a fair comparison to compare your first work with someone else’s 1000th work. You are not being fair to yourself.
Sources:
- Gianna on eventbrite – https://www.eventbrite.com/o/gianna-34450669337
- Lax lifestyle site – art therapy series that features mandala- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxl8yLAwpeoFYF75mnGuEZA