This past week I participated in Five Days of Mandala Magic, a free online workshop offered by Julie Gibbons. Ever since I first found out about this workshop two years ago I had wanted to sign up.

I highly recommend taking the workshop the next time it is offered! If you are interested in learning about mandala/zendala then I suggest that you go right now to Julie’s site and sign up for her newsletter. That way you will receive a timely notification regarding when her next free workshop will be offered. She also teaches a year long, paid Mandala Magic course. Julie Gibbons has a great teaching style and you will learn a lot about the symbolism and emotionality of the mandala art form, as well as how to construct different types of mandalas. Zentangle aficionados will love it too.

Please feel free to skip over this paragraph, but I want to document a bit about my own experience with mandala. A couple of things… way back when I was in the eighth grade  we received an assignment in math class to create a geometric design. The requirements were to make the design using ONLY a ruler, compass, and/or protractor. Without giving it much thought I set out to create my design. Wouldn’t you know it, it turned out to be a mandala! I was very proud of my work; both because it was lovely and because it turned out so well. My mandala was definitely in the top two regarding the “best in show.”  So I guess what I’m saying is that I’ve had an appreciation of mandala going back to my early teen years, even though I didn’t really understand what a mandala was nor what the history and significance of the mandala were at the time. Very influential!

I’ll also mention here that I earned a Master of Science in Counseling at Johns Hopkins University in 1998. During my studies I realized that I had great interest in Carl Jung’s work — in both personality type (check out the Myers -Briggs Personality Test) , and also in the mandala as an archetype.

The first mandala proper assignment in the workshop was to create a  Lotus Flower Mandala. Here is what I came up with:

For this mandala I used an official Zendala tile. The outlines were drawn using a black Sakura Pigma Micron 01. The coloring was done using watercolor crayons. I liked the focus on greens, blues, purple, pinks, and a touch of yellow. Thank you Julie for this first exercise! I very much enjoyed building this lotus flower mandala.