Butterfly Mandala With Swirling Paisley Patterns Coloring Page

Almost every enclosed space on this page has a curl inside it. The butterfly fills the middle with wings held wide, and rather than plain cells those wings are packed with paisley teardrops, spirals and small cross hatched panels, each one closed and colorable on its own. The body is banded into segments and the antennae end in two dots. Surrounding the insect is a ring of heart shaped and fan shaped units, and each of those is filled with more of the same swirl motif, so the eye keeps finding the pattern repeated at a different size. The outer rim steps in and out in small battlements. This is a page for fine liners or sharp pencils rather than anything thick, and it rewards a limited palette: three colors used strictly in rotation around the ring will make the symmetry obvious, where thirty random colors will hide it. A useful shortcut is to work only the paisley shapes themselves and leave the space around them white, which turns the drawing into a floating pattern and roughly halves the labor.