Research
For this project, I conducted research on three main things. Initially, I read a bunch of articles about mandalas and looked at several pictures of them. Prior to this project, I knew what they were and had seen them in presentations in other art classes. Now knowing I was going to be creating one myself, I viewed them in a different light. I paid attention to what specific qualities I saw that I liked, such as the incorporation of background color, scale, and repetition of certain elements. Here are three examples of mandalas I liked.
After getting an idea of what style of mandala I liked, I did research to figure out what possible abstractions could be included within mine. This was guided research, as we were prompted in class to find ten images of natural and mechanic objects and create different abstraction drawings from those images. We placed those abstractions in grids once they were finalized. Below are mine.
After creating these grids, I did some final research on color themes since that was an important quality within mandalas. I first used the Adobe Color website and was able to find a lot of unique and aesthetically pleasing combinations. I had planned to use this website the whole time but after a routine facetime call with my dad, he suggested another website where he had found some other premade color themes. The website was called, “wheelofnames.com”. As an eighth-grade teacher, my dad said he used this website for some activities in class and often had a lot of fun customizing the colors within the wheel. While an untraditional way of obtaining color information, I actually used the themes within this website a lot as inspiration for my final mandalas. Here are a few I especially liked.
- Exercise #1:
Iterations
Before jumping into the creation of my final mandala, I did a lot of brainstorming and experimenting with different grids. I initially designed very simple mandala grids because this process was very new to me and I thought starting with simple shapes like circles and lines would help me learn the basics. Here are a few of the ones I made.
Once I had a basic understanding of how to create one, I created a few more and experimented with different values and line weights. Here are those ones.
After this, I knew I was ready to start making different versions for my final mandala. Here, I used my actual abstractions and experimented with value again. I chose directional movement and rhythm as my principles and thus, tried to demonstrate those within my mandalas. Below are the ones that I made. Out of the four of them, I was most drawn to the one that resembled a wreath, as it included a lot of variety in shape and had a natural counter-clockwise movement within it.
Production
#1
Initially, I started creating the middle section. I combined two of my abstractions, the green spiral flower, and spider web. I used value to demonstrate movement and depth.
#2
From there, I expanded the mandala and started adding the first sections of the wreath. When I originally had the idea of making the outer part look like the wreath from my abstractions, I was just going to copy its sections completely. I then had the realization that I could incorporate some of my other abstractions into the wreath among a few of the initial parts and decided to do that instead.
#3
The first non-traditional wreath abstraction I added after this were buckeye leaves. I tried to choose the abstractions that were the most nature-like and would look realistic if they were placed within a wreath.
#4
After that, I added my final two abstractions; leaves and pinecones. Here, I experimented with different values and line weights in order to further show my principles and add texture.
#5
Once I finished this first draft, I adjusted the greyscale I had originally used and made some minor adjustments to line weight.
#6
After I had my greyscale mandala finished, I applied different color schemes to it. Since wreaths are seen as a seasonal decoration piece, I modeled my colored mandalas after several holidays. I pulled inspiration from the website my dad suggested but finalized the actual color scheme on Abode Colors.
#7
Along with my greyscale version, I chose the Thanksgiving and Christmas wreath mandalas as my final ones. I felt as though they demonstrated my chosen qualities the best and were the most aesthetically pleasing.
Link to Portfolio Project
Now that you know how it came to be made, here’s a link to my mandala page. Enjoy!