The adventure began almost a week ago when a Facebook friend posted a picture that caught my eye. I decided I wanted to draw this mandala and so began with protractor and compass on my 18X24 sketchpad. I would later learn that this structure is called a torus. It is actually very easy to draw. I started by marking my center point then using the round protractor marking the points for the center of the circles of the mandala. Initially I was working with 12 circles so my center points were made every 30 degrees. As I worked with this mandala I made a version that had 9 circles which were made every 45 degrees. Then, one that contained 15 circles with center points every 24 degrees.
I am sharing what I consider to be rather imperfect images. After drawing the image with a regular pencil in the compass I traced the pencil line with watercolor pens. The are places where I continued on even though I was aware of the imprecision at each step.
In his post about this image Brett Joseph wrote about polarity and I was immediately attracted to the idea that although two colors were opposing each other they worked together in a harmonious way. I started playing with the idea of redoing the mandala with three colors. I wanted to add green for the red-blue-green color combination which is a favorite. I wrote a comment on Brett’s post explaining what I wanted to do.
I did not find this mandala particularly interesting or noteworthy. In the meantime Brett replied back that I might find that 2 or 4 colors worked better than 3. I was quite curious why this would be and so tried one with 4 colors.
I reasoned that the lowest denominator for the number of circles may be the most pleasing number of colors for this particular structure. Had I stumbled on some design principle or sacred geometry axiom? My next experiment was to draw a 9-circle torus with 3 colors. As expected this one has a great deal of geometric symmetry.
My final experiment were two drawings with 15 circles. The first is the three color version.
Interestingly, the dots that show up in these photos are the circle centers. Once I started working with the 9 and 15 circle mandalas the circumferences were no longer intersecting the centers of other circles.
Here is the final experiment. I wanted to see if I could discern the difference in effect of a 15-circle mandala colored with three colors and one colored with 5 colors.
I am writing this without having reached clear conclusions. Sacred Geometry is certainly an interest but this exercise has shown me that I still have much to learn.
