For this project, we had to create a mandala in Illustrator. We created a template for a mandala with 8, 10, 12 or 16 pieces.
I found this project to be very fun and relaxing once the setup was finished, as I liked watching the lines repeat themselves. I liked figuring out what I wanted to create and how to achieve that with the repeating lines, as well as accidentally drawing something and liking the result of it. Multiple lines didn’t turn out how I intended them to turn out, but I ended up liking the end result. I also enjoyed playing with the different brushes that we installed, and how they reacted to pressure. Some of them changed the size of what I was putting on the art board, like the butterflies, snowflakes and flowers. Others remained the same, but distorted when I did more than a dot. This allowed for some creative lines and borders.
We had to create two mandalas. The first is a black and white mandala, which was laser printed on a material of our choosing. I chose to laser engrave mine on rose gold plastic. I actually ended up combining two of mandalas for my laser engraved mandala, and the result ended up pretty cool (if I do say so myself).
Here is the black and white version:
We also created a video on creating the mandala in illustrator, showing our process.
We also had to create a colored mandala. We used the same process, but were free to use color on this one. I went a bit simpler on this one, as combining two mandalas (probably) wouldn’t work as well on this one.
Here is my colored mandala:
