I picked up Klaus Holitzka’s Islamic Mandalas book at Pennsic this year. It’s full of rotational geometry designs. Since this scroll was assigned at the same time as the previous one, I looked to this book for inspiration and settled on one with a very linear pattern that I thought would be easy to reproduce with a ruler and compass. Not so much. Somehow, my lines kept getting misaligned and warped the design. It took me a couple of tries to get it close enough to work.

Once I was satisfied with the layout, the next challenge was figuring out the color blocking. It took me a few minutes to parse those lines but, once I figured it out, it didn’t take long to do.

I went back over it all again with a micron pen to sharpen up the borders. It made a noticeable difference.

Materials: 5″x7″ pergamenata, ruler, Ames lettering guide, pencil, eraser, 01 micron pen, Winsor & Newton gouache, Finetec gold paint, Princeton heritage 2/0 round paint brush, Speedball Super Black ink, dip pen