Mandalas

I have referred several times already on this blog that I am in the process of de-stashing the house. As we are painting everywhere and have to take everything out of whichever room we are working on, it seemed to make sense to go through it all before putting it back. The other incentive was watching the Hoarders programme (on CBSReality if you are in the UK). No way was I going to end up like that! It turned out that I'm actually pretty good at getting rid of things. It was mainly the fact that there was room for it all that stopped us getting rid of what we no longer needed.

Books were the things that took up most space and I am definitely the guilty one. Apart from about 10 books all of them belonged to me. It was fascinating to revisit all my past interests and see the relevant books on each subject. Silk painting, bobbin lace, macrame, crochet, knitting; I have visited all of them, done lots of projects but am now so over them (although the knitting might be coming back). In those cases it was very easy to pass the books on to the charity shop. Then there were the art books. Most of them stayed. They are timeless and I still regularly refer to them.

The embroidery books were next. It's safe to say I know how to embroider, and why I possessed multiple stitch books is anyone's guess. The fast majority of them departed the premises, and I only kept those ones that had been opened in the past few years or so. The fast majority of quilt books also went the way of Oxfam (in Penicuik if you are interested). The only quilts I have ever made from someone else's pattern are the 100 Modern Quilt blocks by Tula Pink as part of the #100days100blocks project, so why I had so many other ones again is a mystery.

I kept the books that gave me joy when I looked into them.

Then there were the books about mixed media and art journaling. The fast majority of them stayed!

Going through my books gave me a very valuable insight into what I'm interested in here and now, and most likely in the future. And it's art journaling. Every book I picked up on that subject I immediately wanted to look through. So my art future seemed to be written for me already in the books I didn't want to let go off.

I found no less than 5 books on the subject of mandalas. Clearly they were something that had caught my attention over the years but although I had done some mandalas as part of art journal pages, I had not fully concentrated on them. With 5 books to hand that had to change. The book I was most attracted to was: The Mandala Guidebook; how to draw, paint and color expressive mandala art, by Kathryn Costa.

I started at the beginning and did my first hand drawn mandala as seen above. It's done in a Sketchbook Moleskine journal sized 5 x 8.1/4" or 13 x 21cm. The journal had been used for mopping up left over paint, try out stamps and stencils and generally trying stuff out so the background was already there.

I then googled Kathryn Costa and discovered she was running an online class on Mandalas starting the 18th November, just a few days after the time I was googling her. I considered that as an omen that I needed to sign up.

Above is part of our first lesson, that covers 6-petal, 12-petal and 24 petal mandalas. This is also covered in the book but it's always very informative to see it on a video lesson too. It's so addictive, drawing and then colouring them in. I used simple gel pens for my colouring in, some of them with a sparkle. It's a fair bet that you will be seeing more mandalas here but I will try very hard not to buy any more books on the subject! No guarantees though!

If you're interested in how many books went out of the door, I was going to keep up a running count but discovered very soon that wasn't the best thing for my mental well-being and motivation, so I will just say a lot, an enormous lot! And I must add that they had all been read at least once so they weren't bought in vain. The joy of ownership will now belong to someone else.

Most fiction also departed. Life is too short to re-read books when so many new ones appear on a daily basis. I'm going to return to my Kindle to read them. Some however stayed, either for sentimental reasons (such as Gone with the Wind, in Dutch, that came from my paternal grandmother) and others because everything inside me told me to hang on to them. Listing those is too personal but one of them was Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles Images and I even had two copies of it (both in French). I've kept the one with all the annotations I made in it when a student. Now they really were revealing!

This has turned into an unusually long post so thanks if you're still with me. The words just needed to be put out there for my sake, if for no one else's.