Make Your Own Mandala Online!
Courtesy of the Girl Scouts, if you can believe that!
Hee!
This is fun for adults or kids, whee!
Go here to give it a try: http://www.girlsgotech.org/mandala.asp
You will only be building one segment of the overall design. When you view the design, the program repeats the pattern to create the complete design. This is not well-explained in the site instructions.
Here is a cool site with links to places that are all about mandalas--what they are, trraditional designs, how to build them, etc.: http://www.creativity-portal.com/howto/a/mandala/
I have always liked mandalas, and wouldn't mind designing some big, simple ones for painting on the sides of buildings as murals one of these days.
I especially love the Tibetan sand mandalas, although I am unlikely to ever work on one--the monks train for years to do these. I watched one being constructed by a group of monks at the art museum in Raleigh, NC, and it was one of the most fascinating art-as-meditation activities I have ever witnessed. We watched them for hours. It was around 6-feet in diameter. The Kadampa Center Tibetan Buddhist temple that I was attending (http://www.kadampa-center.org/) is from the Dalai Lama's lineage, and they hosted the monks from the Sera Jay Monestary in India who came to make the mandala.
Here are a couple of 10-minute YouTube video of monks making a sand mandala: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uazRvR9p0w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oS6eQ_4PyHk&feature=related
Here is a 2-minute clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIO2ufNmGDg
Here is the dissolution ceremony, in which the mandala is destroyed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdvTbUbCWCo&NR=1
Here is an 8-minute clip showing the life and death of a sand mandala, including the offering to the river: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSLU9PiXgRk&feature=related
When finished, the mandala the monks in NC were making looked very much like this one:
The energy raised by the monks as they were working was absolutely mind-blowingly good, and extremely strong. The mandala took two weeks to contruct, and then it was swept away in an instant as soon as it was completed, to demonstrate the nature of impermanence. Part of the sand was offered to the nearest running river as an offering.
WOW.
On a lighter note: Check out this clip about what happened when a toddler wandered into an art museum area in which a sand mandala is being created--talk about yer impermanence!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J_Ctk4-IoQ&NR=1