Mandalas

 

A chat with a colleague of mine who colors mandalas because she finds them wonderfully meditative made me haul out this book which I had bought off Amazon a while ago. Only a few pages have had abortive attempts at coloring these mystical circular designs, said to have originated in Buddhism, the circle symbolising the wheel of life... or something like that.

The book, The World's Best Mandala Coloring Book - wow, what a claim to make! - has 50 mandalas of varying levels of complexity. The downside is that the paper is a little thin. It definitely wouldn't stand up to water color if I chose to use my Derwent water color pencils.

As it happened, though, I used my regular pencils, my Prismacolors, on these. Like with the paisleys (see post here), I was quite deliberate in my choice of color for these. I would look into my box of pencils, see which color called out to me first, and then build a palette around that color, usually with a complementary color and a neutral in the mix. The pumpkin orange/ crimson lake colors feature in the first two.

With the third mandala, I went for a deep red (with pops of pea green), and with the fourth, it was a day I thought of the sea, hence the light, airy palette there.