PARDESCOVesica and Almond Mandala Coloring Pages
Strike two circles of equal radius so each passes through the other’s centre. The lens where they overlap is the vesica piscis, or mandorla — almond. It is the first figure a compass produces, and the one from which most radial construction is built, which is why it turns up in Gothic window heads, Hindu yantras and Buddhist aureoles alike.
How the figure is struck
- Draw a circle, then a second of the same radius centred on a point of the first.
- The two arcs bound a pointed lens. Its long axis is √3 times its short axis — this one is exact, and it follows from the construction rather than from any convention.
- Repeat the lens around a centre to make a ring, each lens standing on the circle beneath it and reaching the circle above. In our generator the hub is the seed of life, a circle with as many circles on it as the symmetry order, each passing through its neighbours’ centres; the bands alternate rings of lenses with lattices of overlapping circles built the same way and clipped to their band.
- A lens has no flat base, so rings of them read as continuous petal-work rather than as a row of shapes standing on a line.
What is documented, and what isn’t
This studio sells sacred-geometry work, so it matters that the difference is stated rather than blurred. Mandorla is inspired by the tradition below — it is not a reconstruction of it.
Documented
- The construction itself, which is elementary and unambiguous.
- Its use as the scaffold for radial layouts across several traditions.
Not documented — our construction, not history
- Most of what the popular sacred-geometry literature attributes to it. A great deal of that material traces only to late-20th-century New Age writing rather than to any historical source, and we do not repeat those claims here.
Sources
Other styles
- Padma — Pointed lotus petals in interlocking rows, out to a scalloped rim.
- Bloom — Big round petals with petals drawn inside them. Few regions, easy to colour.
- Lancet — Tall pointed arches split by mullions, ring after ring, with a dentil rim.
- Oculus — Rings of tangent circles with trefoils inside, between sectioned bands, under a cusped rim.
- Filigree — A star polygon core, chevron rings and fish-scale fills. Dense, for fine pens.