I'm glad you had the patience and will power to finish this work of art. It was well worth the wait. I know from personal experience what it is like to invest so many hours in such an endeavor. As for the actual image itself, I find it nicely presented and consistent in the technique and NOT overworked. Wonderful subject matter. In short, I really like it!!!

Thank you for this comment. I am glad you enjoyed my drawing.

I have started construction and sketch for the next drawing. Fair warning: It is going to be weird!

1A work done! - I experimented again, but the result scared me, a kind of alien becomes visible.

Haha! I had thought you might want to play around with this one. Too bad you didn't like the results :(

Update: She is using this as her profile picture on social media.

nice work

having seen your highly insightful and incisive comments, I came back to your gallery (I'd been here once before, and was as impressed with your devotion then as I am now). You truly are a graphite artist. I love how you render her hair (and I've seen this in other drawings of yours): It's natural, not smoothed or made cosmetically beautiful. I love the 'independence' of many of the strands---she's sleeping after all, and her hair won't be as orderly as it would be if she were awake. But you seem to be drawn to the electricity of such things. You caught the slumber in her...and the mandala seems to come out of her dreams, and yet she's also resting on it, as if it was holding her up. Maybe you know the traditions behind mandalas, but for some practitioners, the layers of the mandala are layers of the cosmos itself (or of the inner mind), and, by concentrating on each layer, one gets deeper and deeper into the cosmos (or the inner mind). So, despite the tedium of drawing this, some yogis and buddhists would say you traveled through the depths of inner creation. In any case, there's no surprise that your modeling of each form gives each form its own life, while not detracting from the whole. I can see, from your gallery, that you are very intuitive about combining very different elements. This is a fine example. Your shading and shaping of this woman's face is very touching to me...it feels intimate...

Thank you for this comment. I am somewhat aware of the tradition behind mandalas in the sense of hindi religious symbols. In that sense, however, my drawing is not a mandala at all, since hindi religious mandalas are based primarily on squares, and on representing the cosmos. I can't remember if it is about the four cardinal directions or the four elements or something like that. The mandala I have here is a much more modern concept which abandons most of the original symbolism and also the square elements. The newer sort of western mandalas do not have any one specific meaning, but are often used as a form of meditation, or simply as a decoration of sorts.

In this case I meant it as a graphical representation of her dreams: They probably don't look like mandalas, but they are her dreams, not mine, so I am not privy to their content.