ISLAMIC MANDALAS - Tapa blanda

Choose your own colours as you fill out these mandalas in outline, then consult the artist's "chart of emotions" to find out what you have revealed about yourself. Each of the 31 mandalas is drawn from breathtaking classical designs of anonymous artists in the High Islamic cultures of five hundred to a thousand years ago that survive today in book illustrations, fabrics, ceramics, metal objects, and decorative plates. Let your imagination trace labyrinthine meanderings along geometric patterns that run in ten directions, two-dimensional adaptations of arabesques circling a silver pitcher, a 10-starred design, multiple rotating concentric patterns, and entwined hexagrams. Each of these otherworldly images came from everyday objects such as a tile motif from a 15th century Turkish mosque, a 12th-century Iranian Bronze dinner plate, and a 14th-century Egyptian book border. With the mandala come meditative poems from the great Islamic literary and spiritual tradition of wisdom and peace.