From doodle to mandala

 Today I played around with watercolor, ink and pencil and made some doodles, and then I used them to make some mandalas. 

I make no claims on talent. I just do what I do. I am not one of those artists that knows exactly what a piece is supposed to look like at the beginning. I go with a feeling and an idea and sometimes I am happy with the end result and often I am not.  Doesn't matter. I can always tear something up and use it in a collage later, and I almost always make new images digitally from a photo of whatever I have made. I use paint.net for most of my digital editing. It is a pretty simple program that is open source and customizable with plugins. I find the program indespensible. I don't like to use a program that requires me to save my work to the cloud, which is the only reason I don't use PhotoShop. I have been known to use ON1 as a photo editor, but the newer versions crash my computer frequently. I am still plugging along on Windows 10.

This is a scan of my art.

What is next is a photo of the art.  Quite a difference in colors.

I took the photo and used it when I made the images in this post and I have come back a day later to post the scan, which I just took today (July 20, 2026). 

Such a difference in color.  I prefer the brighter one.  The scan seems duller than the picture looks in daylight, and I am not sure why.

Flower Doodle, Ink, watercolor and pencil. July 19, 2026   ©Donna Storm All rights reserved.

I wanted to find some happy colors to play with, and I think I succeeded with that.  I do plenty of dark pieces. It was time to play with light. The yellows oranges and blues are a combination that I like a lot. 

Here is one of the pallettes I have extracted from this painting. I keep a folder of pallettes that I use whan I use the digital paint program.

These are two of the mandalas I made today:

(If you click on the images they will enlarge)

Mandalas 07192026 ©Donna Storm 2026  All Rights Reserved

I hope you enjoy.

I have added a new mandala today (July 20, 2026) to this post, which is made from the scanned image. I am very happy with it.It has such a softer muted feel to it. Which fits with my mood today.