Weekly Blog - 7-11-21: Mandala Art

For this week's assignment, I created a mandala using Illustrator for the first time. I've been using Photoshop for many years so navigating Illustrator was somewhat easy to do. I used the pen tool to create shapes that were inspired by previous mandala artwork I had seen. Here is some inspiration I drew from to create my piece:

I thought this assignment actually ended up being pretty challenging, although enjoyable. My final mandala artwork came out to this:

I started by creating the center flower-like shape. I wanted a strong visual element in the center that draws your eye in immediately. From there, I knew I wanted to create smaller, more repetative shapes, and include a few circular shapes as well to break up the monotony. I redid the design many times, adding more and more detail to each element, like cutting out the center of solid shapes to create more dimension. I had each element and pattern on it's own layer so I was able to easily alter the colors I was working with. I found working on the mandala really meditative and felt like I could go on and on adding more and more detail. I can definitely see myself coming back to this type of design work in the future and pushing myself to make more complex and elevated pieces.

I also really enjoyed learning about the conceptual background behind mandals. I appreciate the idea that mandalas are meant to be enjoyed and viewed mostly as an artistic journey, rather than focusing on the end product. It's interesting to me that so many artists from the past who created mandala artwork are unknown, probably due to the fact that the weren't creating the art to be acknolwedged by others, but to enjoy the process as its happening in real time. There's a lot of wisdom in that that I think can apply to a lot of situations.