Creative hat on
Recently, I've been doing a lot more creative things than the months before. I guess having our daughter home thanks to a cough for several weeks was helping to motivate me as well. She was constantly asking to do something creative and that also gave me inspiration to keep that up while she was sleeping.
Time consuming thanks to the details
One of the biggest things (time-consuming) I started was a mandala pencil drawing. It's A4 sized paper and this means when you start adding details, it's a lot of work. At first, I thought this will take me a few days to finish, soon I realized it will most-likely be weeks. I'm now ten days in, and already spent more than 10 hours on this one. I think even more, but at some point I stopped paying attention to the time. I got totally sucked into the drawing, which was exactly meant to happen. Nothing on my mind, just me and the drawing.
The work in progress
As I already had more than 50 pictures of the process, and don't prefer having 100+ pictures in one post, I thought it was about time for a "W.I.P." post. It took me at least an hour getting through these pictures as I had to pay attention to the details and the pictures weren't shown in the right order. But I got through them, and left out some that looked quite similar as well. The 32 pictures below are those that I selected to capture the process of this drawing.
The very beginning, some circles and lines. At this point, I had no idea where this was going as I started drawing without a plan.
Some more lines made it easier to add small details.
I love what's starting to appear on my paper here..
At this point, I got a bit stuck, and had to think about the next steps longer. I added one or maybe two things a day only as I needed to let it sink in a bit.
The darker edge is my least favorite part of the drawing, and quite a pain to draw, but I have to stick with it now and get it done. Meanwhile, I was focusing on other parts to see the drawing come to life.
This is the part where I really started to feel proud of where this is going and I'm already loving it here. Mixing the white with grey and dark grey (using pencil only) is really making it look much better each time I add detail.
Now the middle part is also coming to life more and I really love how it pops of my screen.
The 4 pictures above are those of the current status. This is the drawing now, after at least (but probably more) 10 hours of drawing. It's quite a task but I can't wait until I finish it to be honest!
I hope you enjoyed this Work In Progress post of the mandala drawing, as the finished version will not be online any sooner than next week due to a well-earned break in the weekend.
Stay tuned and thanks for stopping by!