I don't always tackle my hand-drawn mandalas in the same way, or use the same style for all of them. Sometimes I have a clear plan of what I want to draw (occasionally I'll even digitally draw a mandala to get a specific look and then re-draw it by hand), sometimes I do pencil shading, sometimes I don't do any shading at all, and often I have no clear plan and just put pen to paper and see what happens.
They all start in the same place, though - the guideline. Using a compass, protractor, pencil and ruler, I draw a radial grid on paper; this consists of finding the center point of the paper, drawing a series of circles of increasing diameter, and then with the protractor, dividing the circles into equal segments with the ruler.
When that's done, I usually start on outlining the 'petals' in ink. I usually freehand this with no guidelines other than the grid, but if I'm drawing a more complex shape I'll pencil the shape in first just to get it right and then ink over the top. Sometimes I draw the details into each round of petals before moving on to the next round, and sometimes I draw all of the outlines first before going back to the beginning and deciding on which detail to film them with. In this instance, I drew the outlines and the detail at the same time, but left it as plain line art so that I could fill in the shading afterwards.
I use Faber-Castell pencils in a variety of lead weights for shading, from 8B to 3H. I can achieve a range of 'darkness' levels with these pencils, shading some areas very dark, and leaving others with only light shading, depending on which areas of the mandala I want to highlight or draw attention to.
And that's it - the finished piece! :D This one was drawn on A4-size smooth 120gm sketch paper, and took about ten hours to complete.
Follow more of my art, and see me working on things with in-progress photos and videos, on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/welshpixie/
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