Reverse Fill and Mandala Tutorial

This week's Workshop Wednesday will feature a tutorial on reverse fill.

Reverse fill is a new design trend in the world of henna.  Reverse fill entails a design element that is bold because it is filled in with henna.  Some people call this black and white fills as well.  This type of design is also revered to as negative space technique.

To do a reverse fill, you start off by creating an area that you want the reverse fill.  In our tutorial, we are doing a circular mandala design.  To create this design, we first created a circle where our reverse fill will be placed.  We then filled our circle with empty design elements.  Our elements consisted of swirls, lotus flowers, and leaves. 


 The next step is to color in the space around the empty shapes.  To make this easier, we darkened up the lines around the leaves, lotus and circles, and then carefully colored in the rest of the circle.

 Once you have colored in all of the area outside of your design shapes, you are ready to move on to the next step.  You can also simply leave the design as is and do nothing else.  However, we will show you how we continued this design into a mandala.

 We added another circle around the first circle we created, giving the reverse fill design element some space and separation.  The outer circle we lined with scallops for our fancy mandala.

We added some more flowers and leaves around the mandala shape to make the design very intricate.  The floral elements around the circle are a great balance to the heavy contrast of the reverse fill. 


Here is another example of a similar reverse fill mandala design. 


We hope you enjoyed this tutorial.  Keep our tutorials free and regular by sharing this on social media using our handle @HennaArtCanada.