DOMESTIKA COURSE – THE ART OF MANDALA DRAWING – DRAWING THE DESIGN
The pencil sketch
Having drawn the basic grid for the mandala, the next lesson in the course was to make the pencil sketch.
This gives you the chance to try out different ideas, and to correct mistakes, before committing the drawing to ink.
This is a complex pattern, and I think I would have done better to leave a lot of the detail until the inking stage. Also, when I started, I used my normal HB mechanical pencil, and I found the graphite was smudging a lot. I changed over to a Staedtler Mars 2H graphite pencil with a nice sharp point, and this did help, especially after I removed the excess graphite with my kneaded eraser. (I have now thrown this eraser away as it was depositing more graphite than it was removing! I used it throughout the online art course last year, and despite my efforts to clean it, it had become very black. I think the main problem was using it with charcoal. I am not working with charcoal any longer and I think my new kneaded eraser will survive a bit better!)
I made some amendments until I was more or less happy with it. The real test would come with the inking.
Inking the design
This takes far longer than the pencil sketch. You have to work carefully and slowly, and try to maintain as much accuracy as possible. There are some errors with this drawing but overall they aren’t noticeable. I corrected one or two small errors with the use of my Slice ceramic finger-blade, scraping very gently at the surface of the paper to remove the offending marks. If you go carefully there’s not much danger of damaging the paper.
Here is the inked version of the drawing, before adding shading which gives it depth.
I shall be doing a separate post about the finished drawing, which will include details of the Christian symbolism.
