Thank you to sister artists for inspiration!

I had a lot of fun learning to draw toads last month with @kristyglas, and lately I've been in a mandala craze, thanks to @nicolemoker.

Generally, I get impatient pretty quickly with my attempts at art, but something about creating mandalas struck the right chord. Maybe it's because of all the doily-crocheting and paper snowflake-making I enjoyed as a kid? I found this project easy enough that I didn't get too frustrated, and challenging enough to give my brain a nice workout. For short attention spans, creating mandalas lends itself well to working bits at a time (over breakfast, while socializing with people, etc.).

Even though I started each mandala with a pattern of lightly-penciled concentric circles and radiating lines, it was still really hard to replicate my designs multiple times and have them look mirror images. I imagine doing this digitally would solve that issue--I could just copy and paste--but doing it by hand makes the process that much more of a brain game.

I've shared the progression of my first four attempts. I almost didn't post the first one, because it's so terrible, but then maybe you'll appreciate my improvement more 😉. I used a black pen for the lines and a combination of colored pencils and watercolor pencils to fill in the colors. These are are all about 5 x 5 inches and took me several hours each. Mine have a lot more white space than mandalas I've seen online (which have more of a stained glass window effect), but I think I like that.

And here's the grand finale, before and after coloring:

I'd like to eventually work up to some larger mandalas and experiment with different themes and mediums.

What new art ventures have you been exploring?