Life is a beautiful mess. It's unpredictable, chaotic, impermanent. But yet we often cling on to order, stability, and perfection. They make us feel safe, like that giant universe of randomness is somehow supposed fall in line, be predictable, and make sense.
Beauty and joy is often found in the balance, when it's the chaos that suddenly starts to make sense. The events in life that lead us to where we are today. That perfect combination of atoms that make up a giant oak tree, and completely different combination that create your perfect child / dog / car.
This week, we'll combine some chaotic painting techniques with an orderly pattern to see what happens.
The Activity: Finger-paint a Messy Mandala
You'll need finger paint or other paint you can use with your fingers, such as acrylic or textile paint. You'll also need a sturdy paper, canvas, or wallpaper that can deal with the paint. Prepare all your paints so you don't need to touch anything else once you get started. I hope you're ready, because the following instructions are extremely precise.
Step 1 - Get started
Find the center of your canvas, choose a colour, dip your finger in it and make a dot.
Excellent start.
Step 2 - Start a pattern
Now dip your finger in another colour and create a pattern around your center dot. You can continue with more dots, or a solid circle, or a flower petal thing, or a wavy thing, or a swish swoosh type thing.
Step 3 - Continue the pattern
In alternating colours, create more and more circular patterns from the center out. Mix up swishy swooshies, with blobs, flobs, and wavy shmavy things.
You can try and make it approximately symmetrical, but don't stress if it's not.
You can also include two different colours in the same circle. Maybe do the swishies in yellow and the swooshies in green? You can also smudge two colours together.
You're done once you've filled your canvas all the way to the outer edges. And there you have it. You have made a (hopefully) messy and slightly chaotic finger painting, that is also order and beauty when you just zoom out a little bit.
My Example
Here is my completed messy mandala. I used textile paint on a book of wallpaper samples.
Have a fantastic messy chaotic beautiful week my friends.
Love, Lorena