This one was a complete and total labour of love. As part of furnishing our home, I was looking around for designs and inspiration. I wanted a shoe rack that was a comfortable bench with small airy cupboards under the bench to store shoes.

I wanted to turn the bench into a work of art so I asked the carpenters to create coloured panels on which I could draw mandala designs with acrylic paint pens.

Here’s the material I had to work on

I started working on the sections in the panel and drew multicolored simple mandalas by hand without any prior measurements as the surface area was small and I felt confident.

This happened back in January when I was working shifts as well as taking over for a new role from February. In my non existent spare time I had a very few days to finish this off as it had to be packed and shipped. Here’s how the final panels looked when stuck to the shoe rack.

When the doors came on it just felt like something was missing. I brought the doors back home and went to work on them too! These were on a larger surface area so I used pencils, compass and ruler to draw the basic circle and square shapes.

Here’s one of the doors:

When it all came together I absolutely loved the final result. It was like art and my eagerness to give my family something unique and beautiful just came together into something that I’m truly proud of.

Here’s the final bench.

I’m now very motivated to try a huge wall size artwork. Stay tuned!