Kaleidoscopes and Mandalas

I have recently been advised and encouraged by fellow artists to pursue a more functional art form in addition to the 2D work I do now. Image transfer of my present digital images to clay in the form of jewelry was suggested. Kaleidoscope images have been of interest to me lately. I have seen books in small numbers about creating kaleidoscope images manually using more traditional methods. I also happened to stumble across the existence of plugins available for Gimp and Photoshop.

I installed the kaleidoscope plugin for the Gimp and played around a little. I created the above image using Filters>Render>Clouds>Plasma as a starting point and then applied the filter. Interesting somewhat. I think the plugin was designed more for rendering photographs so the possibilities are endless.

Next I used Filter>Render>Pattern>Diffraction Patterns as a starting point then applied the kaleidoscope filter.

Of course curiosity got the best of me and I applied the Polar Coords… filter as experimenting in a previous post.

Not to be completely satisfied with this I explored the internet for more information about creating kaleidoscopes traditionally or otherwise. Oddly enough I was quickly distracted by the world of mandalas. One particular web page I stumbled upon was Clare Goodwin’s Creating Your Own Mandalas. This seems a good starting point from which to further explore. One particular link involved creating mandala via tie-dyeing on clothing. There is much more to investigate