I just couldn’t resist…
I just couldn’t resist! There I was closing down my computer for the night, when I had this thought, “I wonder what the Swirls image would look like as a mandala?” And, being me, I couldn’t wait till tomorrow to try it out – so here are the results!
This is the first one…
…and this is the second one after a bit of digital blending. Do you like them?
And now I really am going to shut the computer down and go to bed!
The Great Round of Mandala
Mandala Magic, Julie Gibbons year long Mandala course started this week, so I’ve been busy creating mandalas for the first round. The course is based on exploring the twelve archetypal stages of the great round of mandala developed by Joan Kellogg and written about by Susanne F Fincher in her book called The Mandala Workbook: A Creative Guide for Self-Exploration, Balance, and Well-Being
These are two of the mandalas I made for this stage of the journey. The mandala on the left represents the Void – a place to rest in the darkness. The mandala on the right draws on traditional wisdom drawn from many sources in which the spiders web is used to represent the darkness and safety of the womb.
This next image is a blend of acrylic prints digitally altered to create a 3D effect.
And this final image, created with acrylic paint using various palette knives, reminds me of an ancient battle scene. I can see lots of fighting figures in it – can you?
“One Man’s Trash…”
You’ve probably heard the saying, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”. This latest mandala is made almost entirely from “one man’s trash”!
One of my workplaces have a large laser cutter which collects quantities of leftover bits from the work that people do on it. This mandala is created from some of those leftover bits, stuck to a circle cut from an old cardboard box with pva glue.
I couldn’t decide whether to leave it the original colour, or whether to paint it, so I tried adding some digital colour to help me make up my mind.
I decided to paint it and this is the result. Which do you like the best?
Playing with Mandalas
Thinking about mandalas, I created this hand drawn one in my small journal the other day.
But as usual, I couldn’t just leave it at that. I had to play with it once I’d scanned it. I started off by adding some ‘twirl’, then blended the two together to come up with the final version.
Once in the blending mode, I find it’s difficult to stop! This image is a blend of two paintings to which I added the Maslow quotation.
Happy New Year!
Happy New Year to you all!
December flew past, taken up with finishing my dissertation followed by a really relaxing family Christmas – it seems like ages since I last posted. But I have been busy creating!
It’s become a habit over the last few years to use this workbook from Susannah Conway to review the passing year and look forward to the New Year, including choosing a word to represent the coming year. This year I chose ‘Emergence’ as my word and placed it in the mandala from the workbook.
After I uploaded it, I just couldn’t resist pushing the invert button to see what happened. I’m not sure if I like it. What do you think?
A couple of days ago, I was inspired to create this large painting by these words from Leonard Cohen‘s song ‘Anthem’:
“…There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.”
Today, I couldn’t resist the call of a ball of yarn in my supply box. It was calling to be made into a doll. This is the result!
I devised this method of creating a doll from yarn last month when I was playing with a few scraps laying on my desk one evening. With the exception of the head, which was stuffed with a small ball of tissue to give it shape, the entire doll is made from wool wound round on itself. This is the original that I made last month.
They’re so simple to make, and have endless possibilities from a therapeutic point of view which I’m working on developing at the moment.