I’ve shared some of Erin’s mandalas on social media using the hashtag #MandalaMonday and the more-likely-to-be-accurate #NotMondayMandalas. For the moment, I’ll put the various galleries on this page, but eventually, I’ll probably make pages for each of them.
Erin started coloring in adult coloring books a few years ago. She finds it soothing, and it gives her something to do with her hands while watching TV. I think she had a great eye for color, and does a wonderful job with these. Sometimes she even has me pick a few starting colors, and I’m color-stupid. Which is sometimes mislabeled as color blind. The difference is I can see colors and distinguish between them properly. I just have no sense of which colors look good together. I blame my mom.
But even with me picking the colors, the results still look great! Early today, I used random number generation to select six colors from her latest set of markers. Which has over 300 colors. Looking forward to seeing the results!
In my playing around with AI, I started using Erin’s mandalas as a base image and then seeing how they could be altered. Sometimes slightly. Sometimes into something else entirely.
I think viewing them side by side really shows what the AI is capable of doing, changing things so dramatically…and yet also holding so close to the original.
![](https://i2.wp.com/sexonthefringe.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/PXL_20230305_165329182.jpg?ssl=1)
![](https://i2.wp.com/sexonthefringe.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/28085d21f17240caaeb74ba5800f7af7.jpg?ssl=1)
And here’s a fun progression I was able to string together after seeing all the derivations I managed to produce from that one mandala Erin painted on our bedroom wall.
I recently used one of her mandalas as the foundation of a blog post image. Yay collaboration!
Purple Whirls
Six Mandalas
Wondering why the latter ones are a bit funky? That’s what you get for telling the AI to have H.P. Lovecraft and H.R. Giger infleucne the image!