Guides to Creating a Mandala

by AdamStanislav - uploaded on August 26, 2016, 8:15 pm

Open this in your favorite SVG editor and use it as the guides to creating a classical mandala, which typically uses powers of two for the number of repetitions of various design elements. This guide allows you to properly position two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two and sixty-four elements. That is because we have 32 diametric lines dividing the circles into 64 segments.



Please note that if 64 is too many, you can ask your editor to hide the id called “Thirty-Two-Guides”. In addition, if you also hide the id “Sixteen-Guides,” you will only see 16 segments, etc. If your software allows it, you can hide and un-hide the various guide groups as is helpful. When you’re finished designing your mandala, simply hide or delete the entire Mandala-Guides layer.



The small gray “Guide-Box” on the top is useful for Affinity Designer 1.5 (and presumably later) users. It may or may not be of any use to fans of other vector graphic editors. If it means nothing to you, just delete the last polygon line, the one with the id of “Guide-Box” (near the end of the file), and the little gray box will be gone.



By the way, don’t be deceived by optical illusions. The sides of the octagons inside the circles look like curved lines but they are straight. They only appear curved because your brain is inadvertently comparing them to the circular lines which, of course, are curved.