Black and White line art

I have a cute little app on my iPad that lets me create mandala designs, and shade them in. It’s a very zen activity… sometimes I clear my mind, and simply focus on the pattern in front of me, other times I focus on a problem at hand, and the act of creating and shading the mandala gets me to tune out the rest of life.

Once I’ve got my design I upload it to a generative AI tool and run it through a couple different prompts, depending on my mood… sometimes I just ask it to use my mandala to make a sticker for my journal, other times I ask what my mandala would look like as an otherworldly flower.

The results tend to be fun, and far more interesting than my two dimensional initial mandala. As an added bonus they are easy to print with my little thermal printers that make black and white stickers — the shaded areas tend to come out with varying degrees of pixilation, but I’m fine with that, and go with solid black and white when I don’t want any pixilation in the final sticker.

The “featured image” for this post was generated by AI based on the text and images in the post… interesting to see a computer’s idea of my process.