Mandala

One of the projects we did in my Art of Stress Relief  class was to make a mandala.

The word "mandala" is Sanscrit meaning circle. It's a spiritual symbol representing the universe. It's used to focus attention during meditation.

There are some rules with drawing a mandala, an inner circle within a square forming 4 gates, and a central point, drawing from the center and working outwards.

I didn't want to bog people down with rules. other than making doodles in a circle. We used a circular graph template found here. The template was placed under our drawing paper so we wouldn't have to worry about drawing circles using a compass.

To get us in the mood, we watched a time lapsed video of Tibetan monks painting a mandala with sand.

Then to take the fear out of a blank sheet of paper, we also watched How to Grow A Mandala. The artist breaks down a mandala design to a series of different kinds of lines with a central dot or seed.

Drawing and coloring a mandala is relaxing and meditative. There is no right or wrong. Try to keep the design symmetrical and if you should lose count as I did when trying to draw the birds and bush, you don't stress about it. Just move on.