What comes around, goes around

Here is another set of mandalas I made following the instruction on both the online class and The Mandala Guidebook by Kathryn Costa. They were done in an A5 sized Moleskine sketchbook that had previously been used to mop up left over paint, wet stencils (all these came from Stencilgirl Products, I think), stamps etc. Having a background to work on is so much more inviting than a blank page.

The mandala on the right came from the book and Kathryn calls it Seed of Life Mandala, while the one on the left is from the online class and has been filled with Zentangle patterns. I coloured in the Seed of Life one with Faber-Castell Pitt artist pen brushes in a variety of colours and used the blue to also outline the other mandala as well as the circles that were on the pages already.

These mandala pages reflect my love of circles and also serve to celebrate today when it is the 7th anniversary of joining Blipfoto. When you jump on a circle you have no choice than to keep on going and see where it takes you. Putting up my very first picture on Blip was a very similar adventure. I have added the picture at the end of this post. I began on the 30th November 2010 as the result of reading a small notice in the Scotland on Sunday newspaper.

I have no idea any longer what possessed me. At the time we were on a dial-up connection of 44Kb (yes, really!) and it took forever to post. My very first Blipfoto below is sized 94Kb and taken with a small point and shoot Lumix camera that gave up the ghost soon after when I dropped it in the snow. I continued blipping using a more up-to-date Lumix, and also occasionally using my old but digital Canon DSLR. The next step was a Canon SX50 bridge camera (I took today's pictures with that one) and then I progressed (or should that be regressed) to using an iPhone 6+. The quality of the pictures taken by the phone are somewhere in between the Lumix and the Canon. The main reason is the utter convenience as the phone is always with me.

Taking a daily picture has become so much part of life that I no longer give it much thought. My camera (in whatever form) is with me and my eye is constant on the lookout for pictures, that is when I'm not using images of my art. Being on Blipfoto has honed my eye even more than it was before and being a blipper has enriched the way I see the world.

my first blipfoto taken 30/11/10

I need hardly add that I will continue blipping with the additional blessing of now having fibre-optic broadband at home. What a difference it has made but the fact that I persevered despite the difficult conditions in the early days signifies that the desire was there from the start to do it, and to do it well. I never missed a single day and have only had to backblip once way back when, and then I was only one day late.

 So here's to the next 7 years!