Kolam, drawn around a grid of dots

The new kolam maker draws kolam around a grid of dots, called pulli, as a seamless repeat. Choose a sikku kolam, where one line loops around every dot, a pulli kolam, where curved petals join the dots, or a kambi kolam, where closed lines run around dots and groups of dots without crossing. Pick a square, diamond or hexagonal grid, a single or double line and your colors, then download SVG, PNG or a printable PDF.

Samples to start from

• Generating…A symmetric sikku kolam on a square grid of 81 dotsOpen with these settings
• Generating…A sikku kolam on the diamond gridOpen with these settings
• Generating…Seeded random on a hexagonal grid, in a double lineOpen with these settings
• Generating…A pulli kolam, its dots joined by petalsOpen with these settings
• Generating…A seeded kambi kolam, its closed lines in two colorsOpen with these settings
• Generating…A finer seeded sikku, 13 dots acrossOpen with these settings

One line, around every dot

Each dot sits in its own square, and at each side of that square the line either crosses over to the neighbor or turns back around its own dot. Neighbors share that choice, so the squares always match: on the square grid there are sixteen such tiles. A sikku starts with a ring around every dot and opens rings into each other one at a time, keeping an opening only when it joins two lines into one, so it always ends as a single closed line that passes between every pair of neighbors. The maker's tests check that for every grid, size and seed.

Symmetric or seeded

With the symmetric rule each repeat holds one finished kolam, turned about its center: a quarter turn on the square grid, the two diagonals on the diamond grid and a half turn on the hexagonal one. Its line stays inside the repeat, so repeats sit side by side on an unbroken grid of dots. With seeded random the line runs across the repeat's edges and comes back in on the other side, so the whole surface is woven from one line. Change the seed for another; the maker remembers your last seed in this browser.

A living practice

Kolam is drawn by hand across Tamil Nadu and South India, often at the entrance to a home, and for many who draw it, it has religious as well as ornamental significance. This maker borrows the dot grid and the rules of the line, not the practice, and it makes no claim about what any particular kolam means. The tile method follows Saty Raghavachary's Tile-based kolam patterns (SIGGRAPH 2004), and the rules for a sikku follow Venkatraman Gopalan's study of square-tile sikku kolams; both are listed in the acknowledgements.