World on Fire Mandala

Introductory context-setting text here

I’ve been getting more art out the door (ok, on the RedBubble) and so impatient to share it that I’ve been posting about it directly on social media [1] instead of taking the time to write a blog post here and then link to that on social media.

So a bit of catch-up was in order, which got even further delayed by writing a bit of rambling on mandalas and their symbology (both supposedly traditional and my own developing ideas), and of course, because I like to drag out the blog posts a bit so that they’re not quite so bunchy in time.

This is where the world went off the rails

I began working on this mandala in mid-November of 2016, which context I shouldn’t need to set for any of you, at a moment where it seemed like the only thing I could do to move forward was make more art.  My thanks to the person who looked me right in the chat window and told me to shut up and go make more art.  Or something to that effect.

Like a lot of my mandala work, it started with a lot of doodling. And in this case, some of the concepts I talked about in my last post – beginning with the dot at the center and incorporating circles as walls between ‘layers’ (maybe ‘rings’?).  It’s largely built of the same types of design motifs (swoops that become flowers, pointed arches, nested curves) as many of my mandalas.

After my success with the coloring of The Watching Mandala, I wanted to incorporate the same thing, but even more fancy because I like to push my skill boundaries lately.

That’s where it went from a nice design to something I love.

Each ring got colored separately (with a few decorative circles getting colored separately) because layers are a beautiful thing, and then the extra trimmed off the outside.

The word ‘fire’ drifted through her mind, in search of something to connect with

I won’t say that I had a particular end-goal or end-vision for this, until I finished it and then started to cast around mentally for a title.

All that came mind were these Sarah McLachlan lyrics

World is on fire, it’s more than I can handle
Tap into the water, I try to bring my share

And the whole thing coalesced for me around that music.

You can find it on RedBubble (as is typical) and on Zazzle (which is not).

[1] FaceBook as Ninth Circle Design; Twitter as 9thcircledesign; G+ as Ninth Circle Design. Follow me for blog links, new designs, doodles, and (on Twitter) retweets of better spoken people.

Follow

Share on Tumblr