Not About Harry Potter Post

Yes, Z went to the party at Borders and C went to one of the many parties at bookstores on Union Square last night. Yes, we went this morning bright & early and picked up the book and the audio. Yes, Z's had her nose in the book all day and we listened to the tape all the way home.

But this post has nothing to do with that. I did something magical of my own today. I painted a mandala for the first time! Well, I've done watercolor mandalas, but never an acrylic one, and this is precisely what I've been taking this course to learn how to do! Today's was a simple one, though it took me nearly four hours. By the time I was finished, I felt pretty comfortable with some of the techniques I'd been practicing, and I am very happy with the result.
I have been reading about the root chakra, so I made a simple root chakra design after a happy discovery of a pad of canvas paper in the basement. I began by scrumbling yellow and ochre, then drew on the design when it was dry. I didn't really plan the colors; I just knew that I wanted to use predominantly reds, the color of the root chakra. Yet the blue sky seemed to want to be there on the perimeter, so I put it there, and the night sky appeared on the inside of the circle as well.

The little gold strokes in the background were made with a fan brush. Z taught me to do that - isn't it cool?

If you click for a close-up, you will see that I tried to give some texture to the gold square in the center. I'm not too practiced at this yet, but I liked the result. I plan to take the painting along to the next class to ask Ro for some pointers.

For our final project in the painting class, we're to choose an artist to study and emulate, and then do something of our own in that artist's style. I'd planned to do Rousseau, as I love his lush jungles, but I think I may do Georgia O'Keefe - the lotus petals of this chakra remind me a little of one of her flowers, and since I'm going to do a mandala for my final, I'm thinking a really wild challenge would be to do the whole thing emulating her flower style, if I can pull it off. I've been working hard on color modulation with colored pencils for the past couple of months, and now am struggling with it in acrylics, so O'Keefe is a natural one to study.

I'll have to show you N's creations tomorrow, however, as the battery on my camera has just run down and I can't upload any more this evening.

~Namaste