Wintering (Original)

A half-mandala filling the right of the page, snowy blues and whites.

I drew it in December on white paper, and it fought me the whole way. I kept making mistakes. Some of them I could keep: in a mandala, if you repeat a mistake all the way round, it stops being a mistake and starts looking like it belongs. Nobody can tell. Others were stuck out at the edges looking ridiculous, so I painted the whole background out in black ink. That's how it came to be a black piece at all — frustration, mostly.

I'm all for stopping something that isn't working, and I do it often. But I was curious here: could I make something out of the mistakes rather than abandon them? The black turned the wrong parts into a background, and it made the colours in the mandala sing.

It still isn't my favourite thing I've made, and I think that's more about how I felt while making it than about the drawing itself. Looking at it now, I can appreciate it. It may well be for somebody else, and that's reason enough.

Watercolour, gel pen and fineliner on hot-pressed watercolour paper, with a black ink background. A4 (21 × 29.7 cm). Signed by me.