Feature Art No. 13 by Catherine Palacios

Title: La Lacertilia

Description: This piece was created with of colored pencils, water color pencils, and watercolor paint within the five sections of the circle. Palacios specifically chose specific colors to give it a warm and vibrant feeling when looking at it. Students were required to choose a reptile, which led her to choose a bearded dragon after the she owns named Lazarus.

Mandala’s are a sacred sand painting done by Buddhist Monks of Tibet. The ceremony takes nine days, after the mandala is finished, the monks who created it, destroy it. The destruction of the mandala is important to the ceremony because it symbolizes the impermanence of life. The basic pattern of the circle with a center is found in nature and is seen in biology, geology, chemistry and other sciences . Flowers, spider webs, and the rings found in tree trunks all reflect the mandala pattern, ‘circle with a center’.

The students were asked to find an animal or reptile and a man-made object such as a mechanical part. The combination of the organic and man-made objects created a very unusual design. The learned objectives in this project were, image transfer, composition balance and contrast, repetition of pattern, organic shapes vs. geometric shapes and color theory using mixed media color application of colored pencils, watercolor pencils and watercolor.

This author can be reached via twitter @RivasCayla via email: Cayla Rivas.