Bold & Bright

It's a coolish, greyish day in central New Jersey, which seems like the perfect time for a big, bold Mandala to brighten up your Monday! This one features Wendy Vecchi's Garden Party stamps from Spellbinders; radiant, radiating, rainbow shades of Wendy's Archival Inks from Ranger; and a whole lot of MAKE ART and Studio 490 stamps and stencils applied over and under the hand-drawn mandala shapes I rendered with my Letter It Fineliners. 

I work on mandalas in many different ways to keep things interesting, but for those interested in process, this piece went... roughly... like this:

• Lightly pencil-sketch a few concentric circles, centered on an 11x11" piece of bristol board. An old school compass is good for this, you can even trace rolls of tape or your nested circle dies, but I do also love the Helix Circle Tool!
• Apply Archival Inks with a Mini Ink Blending Tool and Domed Foams, working in rings from the center outwards and allowing them to blend wherever they overlap. Colors are: Prickly Pear, Bluebird, Night Sky, Cactus Flower, Rosey Posey, Peachy Keen, and Sunflower... then around again to Prickly Pear, etc.
• Stamp the large floral cluster from the Garden Party set in the center in Watering Can Archival.
• Add background patterns by stamping a variety of small elements and portions of large background stamps more or less randomly, in coordinating colors.
• Draw the basic structural lines with a .01 or .04 Letter It Fineliner, again working from the center outwards; starting with the two large concentric circles, adding large petal shapes and large circles between the petals.
• Add detail lines and shapes such as the rings of smaller circles and petals, plus the secondary "shadow" lines inside or outside the larger shapes.
• Using sticky notes to mask if necessary, neaten up the loose rings of color with Ranger Detail Blending Tools; for example I applied more Bluebird ink to the area around the Garden Party florals so the circle border is a darker green; I pulled more Peachy Keen out into the large hand-drawn petals; darkened the ring of smaller circles around the center, etc.
• Add more definition with a white paint pen in the form of lines, dots and small hearts, then outline with a .01 Fineliner.
• One final neatening up of shapes and shadow lines with coordinating brush pens wherever necessary.

Making Many Mandalas!

I love Rubber Stamp Tapestry's Peg Stamp Sets from The Ink Pad and at the moment my favorite is their Make a Mandala Set. RST designs all of their stamps so they're centered neatly on the peg without too much extraneous rubber; and the Make a Mandala set also has a line on the peg to show you exactly where the center of that design is... making it even easier to position each element of your mandala with perfect precision! Visit The Ink Pad Blog to read all about this set of tiny but vivid mandala cards!

Stamped Mandala

It's Mandala MUM-day, thanks to the beautiful flowers in Wendy Vecchi's Thank You Stamp, Die and Stencil Set and her newest Ranger Archival Ink shades: Goldenrod, Periwinkle and English Ivy.

This time, I did all of my stamping on watercolor paper, so that I could try "watercoloring" with the Archival Inks. Or, more accurately, I should say PAINTING with the inks, because, of course, the Archival formula is permanent, so you can't dilute it with water. But I was intrigued by the idea, so I filled one of my waterbrushes with 91% isopropyl alcohol (and then I labeled it with a piece of tape, so I wouldn't get it mixed up with my other waterbrushes) dispensed a few drops of my Goldenrod, Periwinkle and English Ivy Reinkers onto my craft mat and started painting. 

I discovered that less is definitely more with this method, and you don't want to over-work your stamped image; but basically you can indeed to something quite similar to watercoloring and you get a lovely soft result, with subtle shadings! I also found that while the technique works fine using drops from the reinkers, the color is SO concentrated, that unless I wanted a really dark shade, I preferred to smoosh the Archival Ink Pads onto my craft mat, mist very softly with rubbing alcohol, then pick up the slightly less intense color that way.

I stamped the bottom and second-from-top layers as single units on solid pieces of watercolor paper, but did the rest of the leaves and the largest flower on scraps, then used the coordinating dies to cut them out. I discovered that I got a little more separation between layers... and more of a "mandala like" design... by adding a circles of coordinating cardstock. Most of my layers are flat, but I've popped a couple up on foam tape for even more dimension and drama.

Coffee Mandala

It might not be very zen to create a mandala consisting entirely of caffeinated beverages, but when I saw all of the fun little icons in Everyday Explorers Co's Coffee Snob Stamp Set from The Ink Pad, my first thought was that they'd make a really cool mandala. I stand by that belief!

I confess that I "saved" this idea especially for the Coffee Loving Cardmakers' Fall/Winter Blog Hop, because the cards that link up to that are always AMAZING and I felt like I needed to bring my A-Game! That's "A" as in Amy Tsuruta, who never, ever, fails to inspire; and like me, rarely turns down a delicious caffeinated beverage!

This is one of those times when a MISTI turns a job that would be seriously daunting, into something perfectly simple. Because while I suppose I could have hand-stamped each icon four times, I doubt I could have lined them up as precisely as this. With the MISTI, though, I just used the grid to center my first element ("more coffee") on my 3.5" square of paper, stamped it, rotated the paper 90 degrees (WITHOUT moving the stamp!) and stamped again; repeating those steps until I had all four sides completed. Then I removed the "more coffee" stamp and placed the cafetiere, heart and star in a little cluster and repeated the stamping + rotation operation four more times. I made two separate mandala layers, cut out and matted both, then finished off with a single icon ("now I'm fully awake") which I fussycut neatly and added to the center.  

To make the mandala into a card, I matted with the cloud paper from Lawn Fawn's Into the Woods Remix paper pad and made a 5.5" square card from some Distress Woodgrain Cardstock.

Now that I've mastered this technique I want to get out ALL of my Everyday Explorers Co stamp sets and see what other fun mandala designs I can create! Happy Mandala Monday and Happy Coffee Lovers' Blog Hop! ♥