Mandala in Ink

This week’s drawing is a “Healing Mandala” design. I drew it during a difficult couple of weeks in November when my mental health was very poor and my pain was very bad. I was in bed for half of the first week and all of the second week so that’s where I drew most of it. It really did help me through.

Healing mandalas usually have a focus to help the individual looking at them to reduce their stress, heal emotionally and reflect deeply. I focused my mandala on nature. Traditionally mandalas are geometric designs. I found putting together strong geometric shapes and patterns with natural elements like leaves, flowers and pollen was a very calming combination. It also helped me to draw out the wholeness I feel when I am within a very natural environment.

Oddly I began this whole healing journey with trigonometry! I used my trig and a pair of compasses to draw out a six-sided plan for the mandala…

It began looking like a range of overlapping circles. Circles are important in mandalas since they represent wholeness, unity, harmony, kinship and health. Then I adjusted the circles into large roundish leaf shapes. I worked on the centre first and then from the outside in gradually building up my nature motifs. The idea was to make a large lotus flower shape and then to have natural designs on each petal.

Here is the final design…

What kinds of things would you put into your picture if you drew your own healing mandala?

Brahmin Moth Caterpillar – line and wash

I discovered some amazing creatures on one of Reddit’s biological forums the other day. They were the weirdest caterpillars I’ve ever seen. I decided to draw one in ink and then paint it with watercolour. It proved to be a really wonderful subject. I was thoroughly immersed in the drawing. Here is the first photo I remembered to take. I had completed the Caterpillar in pencils and inked quite a lot of it…

I wasn’t really sure how I intended to ink the leaves on my picture so I tried a few methods out on some scrap paper…

I chose one and then continued working my way through the rest of the drawing with my pen. Here’s the completed ink drawing…

Next I painted a big colourwash over the whole picture and, once that was dry, I added small colour washes for the details. Here’s the final picture…

Ink Adventure 3 – a Crow and some trees

In my final week of experimentation with ink I played around with splattering ink and dropping ink to paint some trees and a crow.

For the trees I painted a big wet blob on the paper with clean water. I let it sink in and then I painted it again to make sure it was really wet. Then I dropped quite a few drops of ink into the little pool that I had made. I then did the same thing again for each additional tree. I tried really hard not to disturb the ink/water mixture. Eventually I put the painting high up on top of my printer where Leia (my cat) couldn’t get to it and left it to dry naturally. This took all day! I did get some excellent patterns in the ink.

Once it was dry I painted on the tree trunks and the ground. Here’s the final picture…

The last painting I did was of a crow. I drew all of the crow except his wings in ink pen (Pigma microns and a thin, flexible tipped cartridge pen). Then I dropped a big pool of ink and blew it across the page. It really took some courage to do that since in one breath I might have ruined the whole painting! Then, when the first wing was dry I put another smaller blob of ink on the paper and blew it again for the second wing. Finally I went back into the drawing and tried to join up the wings and body more smoothly. Here’s the last picture…

I quite like this one. I do love crows generally and the ink splatter makes this crow look particularly scruffy! It reminds me of a one legged crow I met many years ago in a municipal garden next to a shopping centre. I was eating bread pudding and this intensely scruffy one legged crow hopped next to me for 200 yards. He was quite clearly begging for some bread pudding. I gave in and shared my food with him. He was extra friendly.

Ink Adventure 2 – Dropping the ink

Continuing with my series of ink paintings, this week I have a painting of a wave and a painting of a snail for you. For both of these pictures I used the technique of dropping permanent ink onto very wet paper. When I did this the ink spread out across the watery surface and after a few seconds partially dried. Then the dried sections floated around like an ice-flow in Antarctica with bits breaking off and other bits holding together. It was fascinating. I tried to think of ways to use the texture which this technique lent to the ink.

First I thought about using it to represent turbulent water under a wave. I painted it in and then added some smoother water on top.

It kind of worked but I didn’t think the technique came through strongly enough to really show what it can do. So I had another go. This time I used it to paint a cobbled pathway which my snail was slithering along. This was much more effective. You can really see the sections of ink. Here’s the second painting…