LifeBook Week08: Finding Your Centre with Mandalas

This LifeBook lesson was presented by Faith Evans-Sills and involved painting a mandala on top of a busy, stencilled background with collage pieces as the first layer. I used some of my gelli prints, but most of them got covered up. You can see some of the pinks, oranges and greens peeking through though if you look closely.

I already gave you a sneak peek at this project in my previous post. This is the final page. After a lot of deliberation, I decided to add a butterfly napkin transfer and a definition of the word 'tranquillity', which mandalas signify to me. It wasn't part of the lesson, but I felt something was missing from my page. If I had done this on a canvas or a board like in the lesson, I wouldn't have added these, but for an art journal page, I felt they were almost necessary.

I enjoyed painting my mandala - it was indeed quite a meditative exercise. The challenge was to find colours that set it off from the background but still harmonize with the other colours. I enjoyed this lesson a lot and I'm inspired to use mandalas in my art again in the future!