Navajo and Tibetan Sand Paintings

Navajo Sand Painting Tibetan Sand Painting

The landscape of Southwestern United States (yes, they have lots of sand!)

Here a Navajo Indian pours colored sand or ground grain very carefully onto a buckskin or cloth….

The colors for the painting are usually made with naturally colored sand, crushed gypsum (white), yellow ochre, red sandstone, charcoal, and a mixture of charcoal and gypsum (blue). Brown can be made by mixing red and black; red and white make pink. Other coloring agents include corn meal, flower pollen, or powdered roots and bark.

Sand paintings of the Southwestern Native American Navajo are created by medicine men as part of healing ceremonies. The paintings are for healing purposes only. Many of them contain images of Yeibicheii (the Holy People). While creating the painting, the medicine man will chant, asking the yeibicheii to come into the painting and help heal the patient. The healer calls on spirits to enter the painting.

The sick person sits on the sand painting while the medicine man chants, causing the spirits to come and take the sickness. Since the painting has absorbed the illness, it is not saved, but destroyed.

Navajo Sand PaintingsThere are hundreds of possible standard designs

Today sandpaintings are made by slowly trickling sand through the hand onto epoxy-covered particle boards. Navajos now also create permanent sandpaintings, changing the design slightly to protect the religious significance when these paintings were shown publicly. Pictorial sandpaintings which reflect the Navajo environment and lifestyle are also made. The sandpainting is intended to be hung within a frame or by attaching picture hangers to the back of the board.

Here is a LARGE sand painting! (Not Navajo) (look at the people on top of the photo)

Another large (the website claimed this is the world’s largest) sandpainting

Sand Bottled Art…

Tibetan sandpaintingTibetan Buddhist sand paintings usually composed mandalas. The sand is carefully placed on a large, flat table. The construction process takes several days, and the mandala is destroyed shortly after its completion. The mandala sand-painting process begins with an opening ceremony, during which the lamas, or Tibetan priests, consecrate the site and call forth the forces of goodness.

In Tibetan sand painting is is called dul-tson-kyil-khor, which literally means "mandala of colored powders." Millions of grains of sand are painstakingly laid into place on a flat platform over a period of days or weeks.

Formed of a traditional prescribed iconography that includes geometric shapes and a multitude of ancient spiritual symbols, the sand-painted mandala is used as a tool for re-consecrating the earth and its inhabitants.

The work is begun by drawing an outline of the mandala on the wooden platform, which requires the remainder of the day. The following days see the laying of the colored sands, which is effected by pouring the sand from traditional metal funnels called chak-pur. Each monk holds a chak-pur in one hand, while running a metal rod on its grated surface; the vibration causes the sands to flow like liquid.

Your Sand Painting Should:

Be a Radial DesignDivide your cardboard into equal “pieces”Each piece should have the same design radiating from the middle

Make your shapes and lines large enough to be outlined in glue