Traditionally in Hinduism and Buddhism, mandalas were geometric designs that were represented the deities in various heavenly worlds. In Sanskrit, mandala literally means “circle”.
However, you dont have to get in touch with your spiritual side to enjoy creating and coloring mandala designs. It can be just a fun way to create attractive patterns and designs, either in your favorite digital drawing app or printed on paper.
While you can use ready made mandala designs created by others, why not have a go at creating your own basic mandala designs that you can then color using your favorite technqiues.
It’s super simple to get started drawing your own mandalas using our own Mandala Making Tool.
Let’s take a look at how you can use the tool to draw your own mandalas.
How to use the Makbreaks Mandala Maker Tool
After clicking the button to start making a mandala, you’ll see a new full screen pop-up open.t
The size of the mandala you draw is limited by the screen size of the device you’re using. The canvas you work on is square, the width and height being equal to either the width or height of your screen, whichever is larger. Unless you’re using a square screen, two sides of the canvas will spill beyond the edge of the screen, but they will be part of the file you download.
The controls for using the Mandala Maker are split between the top and bottom of the screen. We’ll look at the controls at the bottom first.
Line types
The first dropdown selector affects how the lines are drawn on the mandala, though the differences between them are very subtle.
The default setting is Lite and this uses less computing resources to draw the lines. This will probably be the best setting for most users.
The other settings draw lots of curves rather than straight lines, but this requires more processing power and so we recommend these only for more powerful modern computers. Even then you may not see any real difference and may prefer to stick with Lite. The Medium and Heavy settings will give best results when drawing more slowly. In particular, when using Heavy, you may find you draw broken lines with this setting even at slow speeds.
Number of segments
Mandalas are made of segments that reflect the same design. By default, the Mandala maker creates designs made up of 8 segments.
You can use the second dropdown control to change this to as few two segments and up to 20 segments. The more segments you select, the more processing power is required to draw the mandala, so if you’re using an old or low powered device, it is possible you may have problems drawing mandalas with more segments.
Note that you can change the number of segments as you work, which may allow you to create some more unusual results.
Base design
To help indicate that the file you’re creating has a transparent background, by default, the drawing canvas has a checker board design typical of many graphics apps.
If you prefer a white background while you work, click the button with the checker board icon. You can toggle between the white and checkerboard design as you work without affecting your work.
Transparent or black background
The last control in the bottom bar lets you toggle between a transparent or black background. The default is transparent, but you can change this to black and use your brush to erase the background. This will give a quite different result and may work best if you will be coloring your design digitally, rather than printing to paper.
Note that this deletes any existing work on the canvas, though you will see a warning about this.
Zoom level
By default, you work at actual size, but it can be handy to zoom in sometimes to work on details in your mandala design. Just select a new zoom level from the drop down selector (on touch screen devices you can also use pinch gestures to zoom in and out). To move around the zoomed in canvas, hold the Ctrl key and click and drag with your mouse or use two fingers on a touch screen device.
Now let’s turn to the controls in the top bar.
Brush width
The first control lets you change the brush width. You can change this as you work and combine different brush widths in a single mandala.
Eraser
You can use the eraser to remove things you’re not happy with or to draw on denser parts of a design. If you switch the background to black, you will use the eraser to draw your mandala design.
Undo/redo
The left arrow button lets you undo the last piece of drawing added to the canvas. You can undo up to 10 steps of work. The right arrow button allows you to redo any steps you have undone.
Download
The down arrow button will download a copy of your mandala as a transparent PNG file.
Clear canvas
Finally, the trashcan icon will clear any work from the canvas so you can start again. If you haven’t downloaded your work, you will be asked to confirm you want to continue.
You can close the Mandala Maker Tool at any point and go back to the main Makebreaks site by clicking the close button in the top right corner.
Note that will clear any work from the canvas. If you have any work on the canvas you haven’t downloaded, you will be asked to confirm you want to continue.
Save your work for later
If you don’t have time to finish a mandala, you can download it in its unfinished state and keep it safe.
Later, when you have some time you can load the design back into our Mandala Maker tool and carry on working. Instead of clicking the Let’s make a mandala button, just click the Load an existing mandala link and when the form opens, select the mandala PNG file from your computer and click the Load button.
What will you create?
Why not give the Makebreaks Mandala Maker Tool a go now – you can find it right here https://makebreaks.com/mandala-tool/.
And do please share your best mandala designs with us, both plain and completed colored pieces. We’ll share as many finished pieces as we can with other makebreakers to get them inspired.
If you create a fantastic design, share that with us and we’ll look at setting up a mandalas section for user created designs.
