Making a Mandala Part 1

One of my favourite designs is the mandala.  There are so many pattern possibilities with it.

Once I start working on one I can loose hours of time being so absorbed with it.

Part 1

**Part 2 Click here**
**Part 3 Click here**

Tools of the Trade
  After lots of trial and error these are the tools and materials I like to use.  They are good quality without being ridiculously expensive.  And they can mostly be bought from office supply and craft shops. 

Metal ruler - Always has a straight crisp edge.  My wood and plastic ones always end of with dints and nicks in the edges.

Staedtler Eraser -  I always have at least 3 of these handy.  They very rarely smudge when rubbing out pencil marks and they don't tear or rough up the surface of the paper.

Pacer pencil - with a 2B lead - Easy to erase and does not need sharpening.

Pigma Micron Pen -  Black 02 pen.  Archival, waterproof and fade proof.  I use these on all of my drawings.  They are accurate, rarely bleed into good quality paper and don't smudge.

Staedtler Compass - One of my fave tools.  I have had it for more years than I care to count.  Very accurate and easy to use.

Circle Templates - The orange one is Fiskars and came from a scrapbooking shop.  The Clear one is a Celco maths one and came from Officeworks. These are brilliant because freehand circles can be a bit tricky.

Quill Paper - 200gsm XL Multiboard Paper - Crisp white colour, good thickness, does not pill when eraser is used on it.  Holds colour pencil colour well.

The other three very important items I need when creating mandalas are........

Indie the cat  - she is great company and she can always manage to walk off with the pencil I need! 

Coffee - A good hot cup of coffee (sadly I haven't found a bottomless cup yet)

Patience - I don't really start out with a design in mind.  It just sort of evolves as I put pencil to paper.  A bit of patience and time is a great starting point for anything creative.

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Be sure to check back in a couple of days for the next instalment of Making a Mandala

And if you have any questions or comments so far, I would love to hear them. 

Flower Waves

Call me weird, but I LOVE drawing little circles, colouring them in and then filling them with little doodle designs.  Here is how one all came together for the lovely Claire.

It is created with Faber-Castell Polychromos pencils and fine line markers on A4 acid free paper. 

Floral Heart

A floral heart commission and how it all came together.  This was one with fine line markers and colour pencils.  Blue and yellow are not my normal colours, but I think they came together rather nicely.  I hope you like it.

Black & White

Oh I do like a crisp white piece of paper and an assortment of black fine line markers.  Here are some of the designs I have been playing with recently.......

Pretty in Pink

More lovely coloured cardstock.  I do like this pastel pink one.

Colour Cardstock

I am working with colour cardstock at the moment.....and loving it !

Green Petals

Green Petals 

Work in progress. 

Fineline markers and cardstock  

Meow 2014

Hello my poor little neglected blog.  I have been very busy drawing up a storm for my 2014 dairy covers and here is one of my favourites and how it came together.....

I have also started working on A4 calendars

Happy happy me :)

Divine Vivi Heart

I do so enjoy a 0.2 marker and a crisp white piece of paper......this is what I have been working on over the last couple of days.

Doodle Bird Panel

A couple of posts ago I did a mini tutorial on how I draw my owl eyes.  What I ended up with was a half finished owl eye on an A4 sheet of paper, so obviously, instead of continuing on and drawing the rest of the owl (I had just finished 5 owls) I decided to try something a bit different........and so began the Doodle Bird Panel.  

It took me about 2 weeks and around 40 hours to complete and although at some stages I doubted I would ever get it finished, I really, really enjoyed doing it and can't wait to start another one (yes, I am a glutton for punishment)  It is so packed full of details and patterns, that it never got boring and even now I still enjoy looking at it.  Here is how it progressed.

I also really enjoyed adding some collage pieces into the design - something new for me.

And here is the finished image.  

Prints are available for sale on my facebook page. 

  

And t-shirts are available through Redbubble.