This emblematic design is part way towards a traditional Buddhist mandala, here illustrating the wall of vajras and the wall of lotuses that describe the inner boundaries of a sacred space, for example a place for meditation practice. Anything that passes through the three walls is progressively purified on it’s journey inwards. (The final wall, of fire, is still in development.)

Full disclosure: only parts of the design were actually painted, in gouache, at the biggest manageable size. The detail work required in the floral ornaments meant that I couldn’t easily make a canvas big enough to paint the whole. So for a first attempt at such a project, I broke the design into elements, took them all to be professionally scanned, then assembled the whole in Photoshop. If printed at actual size, it would fit on an A0 (849 x 1189mm) sheet. I imagined that it would form the base for a shrine upon which a sculpture of a Buddhist deity would sit.

I took a great deal of inspiration from the tradition of Turkish manuscript illumination called tezhip, but there’s also a dash of contemporary street art sensibility.

The learning outcomes

This project is best seen as a learning opportunity and a demonstration of concept, whilst in itself being somewhat unsatisfactory.

• Designing elements in isolation, because of the need to keep production within A3 in a limited studio environment, resulted in many missed opportunities to create visual relationships between the elements.
• Working in layers of pencil notes is laborious and error prone, making experimentation and iteration time-costly for a hobby.
• Production tends towards adapting element scale for canvas size, and specifically for digital conversion on a desktop scanner. On assembly, elements were clearly produced at different scales, then assembled in Photoshop, and thus look incongruous when layered together.