Lotus Mandala With Peacock Feather Accent Details Coloring Page

A full peacock feather lies diagonally across the right side of this design, its eyespot rendered as a dark almond inside a ring and its barbs drawn as long fine strokes trailing off toward the corner. Underneath it, a spiky lotus rosette packs ring after ring of narrow pointed petals around a small many ringed core. Pale scrollwork sits in the corners behind everything.

The asymmetry is unusual and worth exploiting. Most mandalas balance perfectly, but here the feather deliberately breaks the symmetry, and coloring it in true peacock tones, iridescent blue and green with a bronze eye, against a restrained rosette in one muted shade will give you a page with a clear subject rather than an even field of pattern.

The barbs need a fine nib or a very sharp pencil. The rosette petals are more forgiving. This is an adult sheet, an hour at least, and not one to hand a young child.

The eye marking on a peacock feather has a proper name, the ocellus, and each one is built from barbs whose microscopic structure bends light rather than holding any blue pigment at all.