DOMESTIKA COURSE – THE ART OF MANDALA DRAWING – FURTHER SHADING PRACTICE
After yesterday’s set exercise to practise different methods of shading with the ink pen, I decided to add some of my own to the blank portions of the page.
YouTube inspiration
I have watched numerous YouTube videos on drawing with pens over the years and bookmarked several. Alphonso Dunn is an excellent artist, and I recently discovered Robert Marzullo who has some different ideas for hatching which are unusual.
Practising the shading in different shapes
In the blank portion at the top of the page, I drew some random shapes and filled them with a variety of shading patterns – hatching, cross-hatching, stippling, etc. For most of them, I used my Staedtler fineliner pens, but for the Robert Marzullo design at top right, I used a permanent black brush pen.
Practising stippling
At the bottom of the page I did some stippling practice. Looking at this closely, I see that I do need to take more care to keep the pen absolutely vertical and simply dot with it. I need to avoid moving it after it has touched the paper. Too many of my stipples are lines and not dots! Little multi-directional lines are a perfectly acceptable shading method, but not if you are intending to do true stippling.
The left-hand design was inspired by the centre of a beautiful mandala on a YouTube video by Mandala Aesthete. I love the radiating sun-rays with the different degrees of shading, going from dark to light in concentric circles. The absence of outlines is also very effective.
For the basic shape of the middle design, I drew around a popsicle stick, and marked the divisions. Again, it was fun bringing out a design simply by the intensity of the stippling.
The right-hand one began as a simple spiral drawn with a pencil. I went over the lines with more intense stippling, fading it out to the centre, to give a dimensional effect.
To finish it off, I stippled in a couple of vertical patterns separating the three motifs.
The final stage was to erase any pencil marks. The shapes are determined by the stippling alone.
Moving on
I am now ready to go on to the second part of this particular task in the course, in which we begin to draw typical mandala motifs.
