Mindful Art – Pattern making

Are you looking for ways to feel calmer, happier? Why not try out some mindful art techniques at home?

We suggest to begin with a short meditation, followed by the activity itself. Find a tranquil spot in your home or garden and get your materials ready.

There are several free short meditations online, but we suggest this simple guided meditation:

There are also some useful tips on the Glasgow Club website.

Artists such as Jessie M. King and Grayson Perry in the ‘Domestic Bliss‘ exhibition in Gallery 4 have an interest in pattern and design. When decorating pots, thought has to be given to the overall design and the fact that the pot is a three-dimensional object. Both of these artists use the whole surface of the pot and decorate with varying degrees of patterns and imagery. Sometimes this is done with a lot of fore planning and other times the artist works intuitively creating patterns and design that follow the contours of the pot – painting or drawing instinctively.

*Grayson Perry, Growing Up as a Boy. Ceramic pot made of earthenware and decorated with designs marked into clay, paint, silver and transfer printing, with various images. Glasgow Museums.*

Decorating a pot can be a very therapeutic process – why not try out something similar on paper? We are going to try this with the help of the Zentangle method. This is an easy way to make beautiful images by drawing simple repeated patterns.

You will need:

A4 paper
pencil
ruler (or anything to help you draw a straight line)
black ink pen or felt tip pens

Start by creating small rectangles within the A4 paper. To do this, you can either fold it half down to A5, then in half again to A6 and so on until you have the desired rectangle size.

If you want to spend a bit more time on this you can use a ruler (any straight edge will do) to draw diagonal lines across the paper lightly in pencil.

Then draw, leaning more heavily, the rectangle shapes across the page. You are now ready to decorate each of these rectangles with a different pattern using different coloured pens if you want.

Take your time, relax, begin to fill each rectangle. The key is to keep the same pattern to each rectangle and, if you are using different colours, try not to have the same colour or pattern next to each other. Have a look below at the basic shapes you can use and also how to fill the shapes.