With the Mandala project, I was at first very excited with the prospect of making it- I was interested in what I could make, but very quickly ran into the issue of not knowing what to do. The project, unlike many of the others that I’ve done, was very open ended and pretty abstract- many of the examples had themes, but also many were widely abstract and simply looked inexplicably pleasing. In my confusion, I decided to hold myself to two simple guidelines: When in doubt, make a leaf shape, and don’t have empty space. From the leaf style motif, I ended up filling out the circle with dots and other space filling- lines, and it built out a distinct style somewhat similar to Polynesian tattoos, with the closely fit, organic shapes.
Instead of making a brand new mandala for the colored side, I decided to recolor my black and white one- I was more so interested in seeing how I could change how it was transmitted, and I also wanted to color it in a way more aligned with my thought process in creating it. In my head, the blue dots and shapes are like water, the green is for the leaves, and the purple reminds me of floating flowers- thus turning an originally aggressively high-contrast piece into a much more calm pond thanks to the lower saturation in the colors... at least, that’s what it translates to for me.
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