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Mansi

@theripplepractice

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Helping people remember they are more than their roles. Ripple Stations + creative gatherings. Bay Area, CA.

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This wasn’t just an art gathering in my backyard. It was so much more. Words like anxiety, anticipation, fear and nervousness replaced by pride, joy, confidence and peace … 90 minutes isn’t a long time but art is a powerful conduit to self-awareness. A journey I’d go on again and again with these lovely women anytime.

Curious about my gatherings? Visit maansee.com by @theripplepractice

This is an invitation to show up as you are.

On Saturday, November 14, I’m gathering 12 women at @staytreehousesiliconvalley for The Shape of Me, a creative experience rooted in play, conversation, and reflection.

We’ll begin by making one large painting together. No art experience needed. No blank page to face alone. Every woman begins with the same painting, yet what she creates from it is entirely her own.

There will be time to create, to listen, to share stories, and perhaps to discover something unexpected about ourselves along the way.

You’ll leave with something you made for yourself, and the experience of having spent two hours in the company of women who came together as strangers.

Link in bio to sign up.

#bayareaevents #creativeworkshop #siliconvalleyevents #creativeexperiences #bayareawomen by @theripplepractice

RIPPLE – Reflect. Identify. Play. Personalize. Let Go. Embrace.

When her daughter was about three, @mansi.is.maansee and her daughter began gifting tokens (small, handmade pieces of art, each personalized with a note) to grocery clerks, crossing guards, delivery drivers, and others whose work is essential but often overlooked.

In the eight years since, Mansi has personally made and given over 3,000 beautiful hand-painted tokens to people in her neighborhood and beyond to show her appreciation for them and to remind them that they’re seen – and that they’re more than just their role.

Having grown what started as a spontaneous gesture of kindness into an intentional practice (the RIPPLE practice), last August, she created the first Ripple Station outside her home as an experiment to see what might happen if the giving no longer depended on her alone, but could be carried by a community. Every week, Mansi and her daughter paint together and restock the station (which looks like a Little Free Library) with new tokens, and over the past year, neighbors have taken nearly 1,000 tokens to personalize and give to the many people around them whose work might otherwise go unnoticed, but quietly holds our lives together.

This summer, she launched her second Ripple Station with a community workshop at @sweetshoplosaltos . It was so heartwarming to see the dozens of community members who came by to paint together, get to know each other, and take the time to pause and write a note of appreciation for the people in their lives providing the everyday work and care that make each day a little bit brighter.

If you’re in the area, stop by for a treat and take a minute to pick up a token and write a note for someone in your life :) 🩷💛💙💛🩷

Learn more at maansee.com/ripple by @theripplepractice

When was the last time you spent two hours doing something simply because you wanted to?

Just because.

On November 14, I’m bringing 12 women together around a table at @staytreehousesiliconvalley for a morning of making, conversation, and letting go.

There’ll be paint, paper, unexpected materials, and plenty of room to experiment. We’ll make colorful, expressive figures like the ones you see here. No artistic experience necessary.

You won’t need to come prepared with anything. You won’t be asked to make something beautiful.

You can simply show up, settle in, and see what happens when there’s nothing you need to get right.

That’s The Shape of Me.

And there are just three seats left.

📍 Treehouse Silicon Valley, Sunnyvale
📅 Saturday, November 14 | 10:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m.

Come for the conversations and the delicious grazing board. See what takes shape with your hands.

I’d love to welcome you to the table.

Registration through the link in my bio. ❤️

#bayareaartclasses #bayareaworkshops #creativegathering #adultartclasses #bayareaevents by @theripplepractice

8 women are coming on November 14 to experience what it feels like to have nothing needed from them. We will make together and also separately. We will talk, explore, nosh and nibble and see what it feels like to play. Want to join us? I can still welcome four more women around the table. The link to save your spot is in my bio.

#mixedmediaart #sfbayareaevents #artworkshops #bayareaevents #bayareaartclasses @staytreehousesiliconvalley by @theripplepractice

Last week, my daughter, her friend and I made art together.
We worked on the same surfaces, adding marks over and beside one another’s, responding to what was already there.

By the end, I could no longer have told you who had made which part.

Later, I cut the artwork apart and kept working—adding color, pattern and small details until the large pieces became individual tokens.

What we made won’t stay with us. The tokens will move into the Ripple Station. Someone will pick one, write a few words on the back and carry it to a person they want to thank. A grocery clerk. A teacher. A crossing guard. A server whose name they finally thought to ask.

An ordinary afternoon at the table, three pairs of hands, and now all these small opportunities for other people to feel seen.

If you could pick one of these, who would you thank? by @theripplepractice

Whenever I say no artistic experience is necessary, someone tells me the same thing: “But I’m not creative.”

I understand what she means. She means she cannot draw. She means she would not know what to make. She means she is afraid everyone else will know what they are doing and she will be the only one pretending.

So, at The Shape of Me, no one begins alone.

We begin with one large painting. I offer instructions quickly enough that there is little time to decide whether a mark is good. Everyone touches the same surface. Everyone changes something another person has made. No one owns it yet.

Only later does each woman receive a piece to make her own.

By then, the blank page is gone. So is the possibility of doing it entirely wrong.

On November 14, I’m bringing twelve women together at @staytreehousesiliconvalley to explore who we are beyond the roles we play—through making, conversation and time that does not need to become useful.

You do not have to be good at anything in this room.

Details are at the link in my bio. by @theripplepractice

The hardest instruction I gave four adults that morning at @sweetshoplosaltos was: “You decide when to stop.”

For the better part of an hour, I’d been telling them what to do: eyes open, eyes closed. One color, then another. Switch spots. Move the paper. Go faster. Go slower. Ten seconds are up!

There was barely time to think, let alone judge whether what they were making was any good.

Then, near the end, I told them they could do whatever they wanted and stop whenever it felt finished.

They looked up at me like: you can’t do this to us!

“But how do we know when to stop?” asked one woman.

“That is the hardest part,” said another.

Afterward, one of them said, “I loved how unstructured this experience was. So much of our life is structured. This was a welcome change.”

The funny thing is, I’d given them an extraordinary amount of structure. What I hadn’t given them was time to judge themselves. Or one another.

When we were done, they stayed another hour.

Four women who had only just met, sitting around a table, talking. An hour earlier, they’d been touching and altering one another’s work. Now they were getting to know the people behind those hands.

Nobody had asked them to stay. There was no more art to make, no activity to complete. They simply wanted to spend more time together.

I cut up their collective art into tokens: 74 opportunities for other people to feel seen.

On November 14, I’m bringing a small group together at Treehouse Silicon Valley for “The Shape of Me,” an invitation to explore who we are beyond the roles we play, through making and conversation.

No artistic experience necessary. Nothing to prove. And something tangible to take away.

If you’re local and curious, I’d love for you to join us. The link is in my bio. by @theripplepractice

On May 2, 2018, I took my first photo with an official MansiMakes banner behind me.

It said “Custom Pieces of Joy.”

At the time, I thought I was building a life around making things with my hands.

I was.

I just didn’t understand what else I was building.

Over the years, I exhibited my art at @losaltoslibrary @urfabistrolosaltos @rickscafelosaltos and @redberrycoffeebar, among other places.

Then I began handing small pieces of art to strangers after asking their names.

I painted in public at @statestreetmarket , thanks to @artslosaltos1 , and won the audience favorite award.

I put a Ripple Station beside my mailbox in August 2025, then another outside @sweetshoplosaltos two months ago.

Tables of people began painting together. Sometimes they stayed long after the making was done.

Eight years after that first photograph, I stood at @stanfordccare ’s Compassion Immersion with the Mobile Ripple Station beside me. I watched people turn the knobs, catch an envelope, and realize that the small piece of art inside wasn’t theirs to keep.

They would have to notice someone. Ask their name. Write them a few words. Let it go.

The art is still here. I'm still making it.

What has changed is what I understand it to be doing.

Around a table, it gives people something to do with their hands while the roles they carry begin to loosen. At a Ripple Station, it gives someone a reason to stop, learn a name and say a few words that might otherwise remain unsaid.

This is the work I now call The Ripple Practice™.

I still begin with paint and paper. I just no longer think the finished piece is where the work ends. by @theripplepractice

#ad
I have been holding this news close to my heart for months: I’m one of the teachers for Wanderlust 2027 — the Seasons Edition.

Across the year, more than 40 artists will share 47 guided mixed-media art-journaling lessons, one arriving each Friday. My own lesson begins with a question I keep coming back to: "What happens when we truly play—when we let go of convention, expectation, and the idea that there is a right way to make art?"

My studio tour is also part of the Early Bird bonus collection, available to everyone who joins during the first two weeks. I’ll take you inside the space where I make, write, gather scraps, lose things, find them again, and allow the beautifully strange to emerge.

If this sounds like a year you would like to step into, you can find all the details through the link in my bio.

This is an affiliate link. If you join through it, I receive a commission at no additional cost to you.

@everythingartuk by @theripplepractice

The less I’ve been posting here, the more has been happening offscreen.

A new website is taking shape.

My book is on its long runway toward launch.

A second RIPPLE Station is about to come alive at the @sweetshoplosaltos.

There are gatherings being planned, tokens being made and given away, conversations over tea and across tables, ideas getting clearer, some getting discarded, and a whole lot of life happening IRL.

Yesterday was one of those behind-the-scenes days.

@michelleliuphotography came to my house at noon for a photo shoot. She left at 3:30.

Somewhere in those three and a half hours, we talked about the real cost of AI, “shipping” in junior high, giving handmade tokens to strangers, cultural misreadings, moving to New Zealand, networking events, how Dame works in dancing, and probably 37 other things I’ve forgotten.

And yes, she took photographs of me. But this is a selfie I took after she left.

I wanted to remember how I felt: at ease. Seen. Entirely myself.

Because a good photo shoot isn’t really about putting on makeup, wearing the right clothes, standing over there and smiling.

It’s observation.

It’s asking good questions and actually listening to the answers.

It’s creating enough familiarity that eventually the person being photographed stops wondering what they look like.

Thank you, Michelle, for spending an afternoon seeing me before photographing me.

I cannot wait to see what you saw.

And perhaps that’s a little of what is happening in this season, too. Less documenting everything as it happens. More being inside it while it does. by @theripplepractice

I got a Polaroid printer this morning. This is the first photo I printed with it — the RIPPLE Station, one year to the day after I put those first 30 tokens beside our mailbox.

For eight years, I’ve been making tokens and handing them directly to people — grocery clerks, servers, custodians, flight crews, mail carriers. Over 3,000 of them, one conversation at a time.

Last year, I wondered: could that same invitation to notice everyday workers and have conversations with them live on a sidewalk without me present?

Ino, my friend’s handyman, built the box. My daughter and I painted it teal. We filled it with 30 small mixed-media paintings.

Within three days, 67 tokens had been taken. Six days later, the total was 92. Over the past year, I’ve made and restocked somewhere around 1,000.

But the more interesting part isn’t the number.

It’s what I got wrong.

People loved the tokens but didn’t always understand why they were there. Some became gift tags. Others, bookmarks.

So I changed the words on the Station.

These weren’t simply pretty things to take. They were an invitation to notice someone we might otherwise walk past — the person wiping our table, the grocery stocker, the crossing guard, the custodian, the mail carrier.

The RIPPLE Station was never really an experiment in giving things away.

It was an experiment in whether a small invitation could get us to notice and engage with someone we might otherwise walk right past.

A year later, that experiment is moving beyond my front yard.

On August 23, another RIPPLE Station will launch at a local landmark in Los Altos — made and stocked by the community, for the community.

And this fall, a mobile RIPPLE Station funded by the Generalist World Greenhouse Grant will begin traveling downtown.

What began as my personal practice of noticing people is slowly becoming something other people can practice, too.

Maybe that’s the ripple I’ve been trying to create all along. by @theripplepractice