Flower Kolam-16

A small kolam with 11-1 dots placed in intermediate pattern forming six petaled flowers.

I managed to squeeze some time to divert myself from drifting thoughts whirling around me. Now a days I find very hard to draw kolams as I am preoccupied with many chores. Still my passion drives me to draw kolams whenever I have some time to relax. I feel rejuvenated after drawing a kolam. Usually I never plan before drawing a kolam, Its just an inky pinky ponky while choosing a kolam. I open my note book and glance through the pages. It all depends on the mood to proceed with a line or sikku kolam. I felt I haven't drawn a line kolam for a long time, And that made me to choose this 11 dots kolam. This kolam should be around 1'6" in size.

After finishing the outline, I planned to colour the kolam. I refrained myself from using purple colour in this kolam, though had a tough time to keep aside the purple shades. A friend of mine has advised me not to use the purple shades in near future as my earlier kolams were mostly seen in purples.

How to draw: Place 11 dots in the centre column. In the second column, place the first dot in between two dots of the first row and the count should be 10, keep on decreasing the dots till the count reaches 6. Repeat the same on the left hand side.

Now draw cross lines by joining the bottom three dots plus the two dots on either sides. Now draw the petals, the petals on the edges are drawn just by joining the cross lines. Total six flowers on the outer and the centre flower numbers to seven in total. And the remaing dots are joined together to form diamond shaped boxes and a vase shaped elements inbetween the flowers.

Now the colouring part. Its indivudual choice to colour the elements in the kolam. But symmetry should be followed. The simplest two fold symmetry can be maintained by colouring the same colour to the flowers in opposite directions. I limit myself with three to four colours depending on the size of the kolam. In this kolam I have used three main colours to colour the flowers and yellow just to highlight the centre flower.