Meditative Stone Art by Maria Mercedes Trujillo Arango

Meditative Stone Art

by Maria Mercedes Trujillo Arango

Alleviate stress, foster creativity, and commune with nature while creating beautiful art with Meditative Stone Art.

Let artist Maria Mercedes Trujillo Arango guide you on a meditative art journey, for beginner and expert crafters alike, as she shares her unique and elegant designs for decorating stones. Meditative Stone Art includes 44 illustrated step-by-step projects—21 calming mandala designs and 23 nature-inspired designs, including:
  • Single-color mandalas
  • Multicolor mandalas
  • Flowers
  • Leaves
  • Butterflies
  • Moths
  • Beetles
  • Fish
Chock-full of beautiful photography and easy-to-follow instructions to get your designs just right, along with drawing tutorials and information about gathering the perfect stones, tools and supplies, and art techniques, Meditative Stone Art will have you feeling inspired, focused, and relaxed in no time.

Reviewed by annieb123 on

5 of 5 stars

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Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

Meditative Stone Art is a tutorial guide for painting nature inspired and mandala-like patterns on stones. Released 14th April 2020 by Quarto on their Rock Point imprint, it's 144 pages and available in paperback and ebook formats.

This is an appealing all-ages accessible guided instruction book for transferring and painting designs onto stone surfaces (it would work on many surfaces other than rock also). The book has a very useful and graphically appealing gallery style table of contents showing each of the tutorial projects in color. They are grouped by category: mandala inspired projects, and nature inspired objects. The introduction covers tools and supplies (including making one's own dotting tools), sourcing stones, transferring designs, and a little bit of color theory.

Each of the tutorials contains a color photo of the finished object, tools and supplies in a bullet point list, followed by step by step instructions (including color process photos). The designs are very pretty and varied; there are both naturalistic and stylized flowers and animals along with the circular designs.

There's enough inspiration here to keep crafters experimenting for ages. This would make a great selection for a family activity or library group (when we're allowed to congregate again) as well as solo-mindfulness exercise. I also liked the creative philosophy of the book - the author emphasizes the meditative and mindfulness of painting and art without being strident or preachy. It's a well written book full of lovely things to paint. These would make great gifts, garden decor, or inspiration stones to release back into the wild. I believe I'm going to paint some to leave on friends' and neighbors' porches until we can safely gather together again.

Five stars. There really are quite a number of these which have my fingers itching to paint.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

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Reading updates

  • Started reading
  • 14 May, 2020: Finished reading
  • 14 May, 2020: Reviewed