Mandala

Our final project in Color & Design was a mandala. A mandala is a design featuring rotational symmetry, usually having spiritual connotations (i.e. the yin-yang symbol). Many of my classmates came up with beautiful abstract designs, but all of my designs were pretty representational.

The one I chose emulates a stained glass rosary. The 4 scenes are from the opening sequence of Beauty & the Beast. I've always loved those scenes, and this was a good chance to study them. The resulting design though was very complex, and took me forever to paint! I wasn't feeling too happy about it after I finished, but my teacher really liked it. I talked about it with a classmate and we think that there's always a bit of negative feeling after completion, because we are very aware of what didn't turn out as planned, and we are too conscious of small errors that people wouldn't normally notice. So as I get more emotionally detached from this work, I'm feeling better about it.

We were required to use an analogous split-complementary color scheme. So mine is predominantly blue, with the analogous range going from yellow-green to red-violet. My accent colors are red-orange and yellow-orange, which I've used for the rose, and the 2 rings. I've also used a little accent in each scene, and in the corner designs.