Kolam: Pulli kolam
Draw a kolam around a grid of dots, as a seamless repeat. Pick a form, a grid and your colors, then download the repeat or print it.
About kolam
Kolam is a living practice of Tamil Nadu and across South India: drawings made by hand on the ground, often at the entrance to a home, in white flour or powdered limestone. Many begin with a grid of dots, called pulli; for many who draw them, kolam has religious as well as ornamental significance. This tool draws in the spirit of the dot-grid kolam on a computer. It doesn't stand in for the hand, the practice or what a kolam means to the people who draw it.
Sources
- Saty Raghavachary, Tile-based kolam patterns, SIGGRAPH 2004 Sketches. Each dot's square in the kolam maker is one of a small set of edge-matched tiles, after his tile-based way of building kolams.
- Venkatraman Gopalan, Symmetry Classification and Enumeration of Square-Tile Sikku Kolams, arXiv:2304.14134, 2023. The kolam maker's sikku follows the rules this paper states: every dot encircled, crossings at single points, and no loose ends.