Mandala Maker
Mandala maker: rings of petals, dots and arches repeated round the center. Roll new designs, fill them with color or save line art to color in. PNG, GIF or MP4.
What is a mandala?
In Hindu and Buddhist practice, a mandala is a symbolic diagram of the cosmos used in ritual and meditation, often drawn as a square with four gates around a circle and a center point. In everyday speech the word now covers any design of rings and shapes repeated around a center, the kind people draw, paint or color in.
This maker draws that second kind. It divides the circle into equal wedges and mirrors each one, so the design repeats all the way around and matches on both sides of every spoke.
How to make a mandala online
Repeats is how many times the design goes around, from 3 to 24. Rings is how many bands it has from the center outward. The Seed gives each ring one shape: pointed petals, round dots, pairs of dots, arches, diamonds, or petals with a smaller petal inside. Roll the seed and you get a new design with the same settings.
Size is how far the design reaches compared with the frame's height, and at 1 it touches the top and bottom. Line is the outline width. Fill 1, Fill 2 and Fill 3 color the rings in turn, and each ring's shapes take the fill after the one its ground uses. Spin rotates the rings, with every other ring going the opposite way.
If you want rays instead of petals, Sunburst Background Generator fans two colors out from the center.
Settings for a coloring page, a henna design and a looping spin
Coloring page: use the Colouring page preset (near-black Lines on white, Line art ticked, Repeats 16, Rings 7, Spin 0) and raise Line to 4 or 5 so the shapes are easy to color inside. Pick 1:1 under Settings first, or most of the page ends up as empty margin. The 2048-pixel PNG then prints at about 250 pixels per inch on an 8-inch square.
Henna design: the Henna preset draws brown #8a3b12 lines on #f7e6d0 with Repeats 18, Rings 9 and Line 2, which gives that fine, busy mehndi look. At that density keep Line at 2 or below, or the outlines start swallowing the smallest shapes.
Looping spin: Repeats 10 with Spin 0.21. A ring looks identical once it's turned by one repeat, and that takes 6.28 ÷ (Repeats × Spin) seconds, about 3 seconds in this case. So a clip of 3, 6 or 9 seconds loops.
Why is my mandala cut off on a phone wallpaper?
Size is measured against the frame's height. At the default 0.94, the design almost fills a 9:16 frame top to bottom, and it runs well past the sides, which are only 56 percent as wide. Drop Size to 0.55 or below on a portrait frame and the whole mandala fits across.
Saving a mandala
Line art should go out as PNG. A JPG leaves a gray haze along black lines on white, which prints as dirty edges and leaves little specks a paint bucket won't fill.
A filled design that spins is only a handful of flat colors, so GIF stores it cleanly with Dither unticked, and MP4 gives smaller files for long clips. If you'd like to mirror a photo into a mandala, the kaleidoscope tools are on the Distortion Effects hub.