Making Mandalas, Creativity Tip #22

Gelli Plate Printed Mandalas by Elaine Luther on 6″ round, colored paper

When I teach Making Mandalas, the class is usually primarily about monoprinting with stencils and a monoprinting gel pad such as the Gelli brand plate.

For an upcoming class, we’ll also be covering drawing them by hand, so I did some research, looking for good and useful tutorials.  Here’s what I found that looks good to me, plus some round, or “polar” graph paper that I thought would make things easier.

Some of these items are free and some are for sale, I haven’t bought the for sale ones, so please assess and make your own decision!

Resources for learning about mandalas and how to draw them by hand

Mandala PowerPoint, Historical Reference (free)

Mandala Coloring Page (free)

Mandala Lesson – Art Lesson – Repetition, Pattern, Variety ($5.00)

Post on how to make a mandala using a compass (free)

Printable graph paper “polar”—round, so you don’t have to draw your own for a mandala.  (free)

You can use that paper with this tutorial on drawing a mandala, on the bohoberry blog.

And art therapist Shelley Klammer has a free 30 day Mandala Challenge (you can earn a free class!)

And lastly, here’s a fun way to make mandalas, out of every day objects.  I started making these during #the100dayproject and posting them to Instagram, where I’m Elaine_Luther, if you’re looking for me.

All artwork in this post is Copyright Elaine Luther 2017.