Darling Dots

We normally produce our 'dotty' designs on light plywood or a similar firm base using a gesso base coat and acrylic paints for the colours.

Our most poular items are coasters, tissue boxes, buttons and jewellery. The jewellery are often based on a leatherette or similar in order to offer lightness and strength. The buttons and some jewellery items are hand-made from polymer clay before decorating, again light and strong.

A mandala design is basically circles within circles, which can represent many things to many people. ‘Mandala’ means a circle in Sanskrit, and has long been a spiritual and ritual symbol in Asian cultures.

What makes it a skilful art is the ability to design and craft a complex pattern, with harmonious colour combinations.

The method of painting with dots is very simple, yet surprisingly effective. You take a small circular tool, dip it in paint, make a dot with it on your chosen surface and repeat. How easy is that!

Then choose a few more tools of varying sizes, pick three or four paint colours and form some patterns with those dots. Repetitive patterns are key to good design, as are good colour choices, so put them all together in a circular shape, i.e. a mandala, and the result can be striking.

To the onlooker, a circular, repetitive design is so easy on the eye, there is nothing complicated to work out, it is quite simply a thing of beauty. Which is a likely reason for its continued popularity.

But then we go off piste! Strings of dots in decreasing sizes takes dot art to a different level. There are no rules, this is where you can really play with your imagination.

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