It's true, I'm addicted to dots.
Some people see hundreds of tiny painted dots.
I see quiet.
Color.
Pattern.
Possibility.
An excellent excuse to buy another bottle of paint.
I'm Tara Lynn Pugh, a dot mandala artist and teacher who has spent years turning tiny dots into intricate artwork and showing other people that they can do it too.
MY ORIGIN STORY
My love of dots actually goes all the way back to high school. I had an art teacher named Dennis Capps who created these incredibly detailed pieces using dots. At the time, he was inspired by Indigenous Australian artwork, incorporating masks, pattern, color, and thousands of tiny dots into his work. My high school art teachers were some of my earliest artistic influences; but looking back, Mr. Capps was also my first dotting influence, long before I had any idea that dotting would eventually become my thing.
Art became an escape for me during those years. I often felt like the outcast, like I didn't quite belong anywhere, but I could always disappear into making something. There were no rules about who I was supposed to be there. I could just create.
It wasn't until much later in life that I started taking my own art seriously. And I wandered around a LOT before finding my way back to dots. I learned acrylic painting, fell headfirst into mixed media, played with alcohol inks, and tried just about anything that gave me an excuse to buy more art supplies. 😂
But dotting always had a little piece of my heart.
Artists like Elspeth McLean and Erin Ridley reignited that spark for me and showed me just how much could be done with something as simple as a dot. Over the years I've experimented with different styles and techniques, but somehow I always find my way back to traditional dot mandalas.
There's just something about the repetition. The symmetry. The quiet that happens in my brain when I'm completely focused on placing one tiny dot after another.
Maybe that's why I say dots are magic.
Because for me, they kind of always have been.
WHY I LOVE IT
There’s something about dotting that just speaks to me.
My brain is always busy. I have trouble focusing, I get overwhelmed easily, and sometimes it feels like there are seventeen different tabs open in my head at once. But when I sit down to dot, everything else gets quiet.
The repetition, the rhythm, the tiny little decisions one dot at a time... I get completely lost in it. The rest of the world just sort of disappears for a while.
And I love that I can find inspiration anywhere; a color palette, a flower, a piece of fabric, something I saw in nature. Every piece seems to become its own little story along the way.
That’s really the magic of it for me.
Dotting gives my busy brain somewhere beautiful to go.
WHY I TEACH
Somewhere along the way, I realized I love teaching dotting almost as much as I love doing it.
There is nothing better than watching someone's face light up when they start to see their mandala emerge. That moment when they go from “I don't know if I can do this” to “I FREAKING DID THAT!” gets me every single time.
I love when someone tags me in a photo of something they created from one of my tutorials. I love seeing the comments pile up underneath telling them what a beautiful job they did. I love watching people encourage each other, share what they've made, and get ridiculously excited about tiny dots of paint.
Because for me, teaching was never really just about making pretty mandalas...
It's about helping someone else discover a little bit of that dot magic for themselves. I love how those moments feel.