Drawing a mandala is a great tool for meditation and focus, so I’m gonna show you the basics so you can get started drawing mandalas.
For this, all you’re gonna need is a compass, a pencil, some pens, a straightedge/ruler and an eraser.
Follow the video or scroll down for a step by step guide, you got this!
Draw a vertical line, straight down the center of your page, set your compass to about one inch, find the center of that line, mark a point with your compass and draw a circle.
Tip: When you’re using a compass, you want to make sure that you’re only putting pressure on the point and not on the pencil. You want the pencil to just float across the paper.
Without adjusting your compass, place your compass tip on the intersection at the top of the circle and draw a second circle. Again, without adjusting your compass, use the bottom intersection to draw a third circle.
Now you have created four more intersections (marked with a red circle above) that can be used for the next four circles. Use these new intersections to draw four more circles. And now you have created The Seed of Life, this is the symbol of creation.
Each intersection you see now equals 30 degrees, now we want to find the 15 degree angles, so to do that we have to repeat the seed of life beginning at 90 degrees from our vertical line. Use the 90 degree intersection to create a horizontal line (notice where the pencil points in the photo above). Draw the line through the center as long as the size you want your mandala to be, now we’ve created a 90 degree intersection through our original circle.
Use these intersections (marked above) to draw your eighth and ninth circle. Now you’ve got four more intersections to use:
We’re going to use them to draw our final four circles. Draw four more circles using our new intersections (marked above) to create a double Seed of Life (two overlapping Seed of Life symbols)
And now we’ve discovered our 15 degree angles and we’re ready to mark our guides.
Grab your ruler and line it up from each intersection to it’s reflecting intersection. If your original circles are accurate you should be able to make all of these lines cut straight through the intersections perfectly.
Now we’ve got a grid that shows all the identical angles of 15 degrees and we’ve divided it up into 15 degree sections. This is the basic grid that you can use for creating all your mandalas.
We can start getting creative now and adding some ornamental patterns.
The first is the classic flower petal, each half of the petal is basically an elongated letter “S”.
The petal pattern is made up of two arcs as you can see in the grid above.
Now we’re going to draw a freehand arc to connect these two intersections, this is going to be a leaf pattern with some lines inside the leaf.
And that’s the basic sketch of your mandala done!
Feel free to mess around at this point, add whatever patterns and flourishes you want to, or keep expanding it.
I feel like there’s no right or wrong pattern to use and it’s just good to experiment and try out lots of different shapes and develop your own style. You’ll notice that your mandalas look different each day depending on what mood you were in when you were drawing it.
Now if you’d like, you can ink it. You can go straight over the top with ink and then rub out the lines afterwards but what I like to do is gently rub out the lines so that they’re only just visible and then ink over the top of that. It’s totally up to you, whatever you feel confident with.
My favourite pens to use are Unipin fineliners, you can’t go wrong with these pens! Once you have finished the ink you can add some shading, with dots or fill it with colour. Do whatever makes you happy, just make it your own!
I hope you found this helpful, I’d love to see what you came up with! Share it with me on Instagram if you feel like it @geometryptamine and if you need some more ideas for your mandalas, check out some of my real time mandala drawing videos.
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