Welcome at part three of my dotting journey
If you missed my first two dot artworks, here's a link to artwork no.1 and artwork no.2. I want to learn how to make the perfect dot-art mandala, and to practice this, I'm using cheap material, namely: salt dough ornaments. You can find the recipe in the first post. Super simple and cheap, and you won't feel bad when you didn't create the perfect mandala!
I didn't want to call it a mandala in the first two posts, because, well, it just looked like a bunch of dots really. Today I will use the name mandala though as I'm getting the hang of it a bit. Mind you, I don't have dotting tools, and it's hard to make the (especially bigger) dots with a brush, I'm trying to find some more "tools" inside the house which can be used to create better dots. Unfortunately, the hobby store didn't have what I was looking for. Better luck next time.
For now, I'm using salt dough ornaments, acrylic paint, brushes (the smaller the better) and for one size I've used a sushi stick that was still laying in the kitchen.
The process
I tried capturing the process as much as possible, although sometimes I'm so caught up in the moment and too concentrated to take a picture, lol. I painted the first layer (black) yesterday evening, so it could dry overnight. Although this is not really needed with the salt dough, you can almost see it dry while applying it on the dough.
I started with a big white dot in the middle, as you can see, this one wasn't applied that well, but I thought I should fix that later and not mess around too much with it. I decided to add four red dots to determine (approximately) how to divide the round into four parts later when applying more dots. The same goes for the blue ones. To make them look a bit more connected, I added a few smaller white dots in between the red and blue dots, plus also on the next round layer.
I added yellow dots and when I finished applying them, I wondered why on earth I chose to do so. But, now I need to continue and hope for the best. When I used the sushi stick to make these bigger white dots, I started to like it again, as now the white dots were more visible than the yellow dots. I really started to like the artwork again in the next step, it actually started to look like a mandala artwork, yay!
At the next step, I'm already a few steps further I think, I almost forgot to take a picture. More detail, and more layers as you can see. After this step, I had some doubts if it was finished or not, so I added orange in the middle as well. My honest opinion is that I should have skipped it and left it as it was. Below you can see the final result.
The end result
So here it is, including the orange in the middle. What is your opinion? Is it better with or without the orange?
My Dot Artworks so far
Every time I created a new dot artwork, I will take a picture of those I created until that moment. Below the three works I've created so far:
The left one is my least favorite, and the one I created today is my favorite so far as it starts to look like a mandala. I'm still a long way from being as good as I hope to be one day, so I will continue my journey and hopefully create one work a day.
Practice makes perfect.
Which one do you like best? Feel free to leave a comment below.
Thanks for stopping by!