Kolam Series
Kolams are beautiful patterns comprised of dots, lines and curves, normally drawn on the floor using rice flour and colored chalk powder. These elaborate and extravagant designs are found at the entrances of homes, temples and ponds. Kolam Series is a visual tribute and an attempt to cherish and preserve this traditional decorative art-form.
Kolam series by Anirudh Srinivasan has a variety of intricately crafted vibrant compositions made from the artist's memory and imagination. These are digitally created from scratch using computer graphics tools.
Why Kolams are drawn ? They are an artistic expression of celebration of an event be at home, temple or at a place of gathering. It’s a symbol of inviting, welcoming or receiving. In southern culture, women get together and draw eye catchy illustrations, challenge each other's creative prowess and create beautiful Kolams which are based on the day’s occasion - festivals , temple procession etc.
The purpose of Kolams drawn at the entrance of a house everyday is beyond decorative reasons. Traditionally either limestone or rice powder or a combination of both are used for the basic design. The limestone is capable of preventing insects from entering the houses and the rice powder attracts insects that keep them busy with enough food outside the house. Ingredients include rice flour for base white designs, red brick powder to create red hues, turmeric powder for yellow shades and flower petals dried or fresh
Year
2025
Product
Motion | Posters | Paintings
Vana collection
Collection of different varieties of Kolams found in surreal environments.
Panchavarna collection
Panchavarna means multicolored, specifically five colors, in Sanskrit
Svarna collection
Golden embroidered kolam designs on black linen.
Ghatam collection
Collection of abstract renders consisting of freshly baked earthen pots filled with colored chalk ...
Pulli Kolam
Collection of kolams formed by simply connecting dots in creative ways
Process
It all started with Anirudh studying and understanding how kolam patterns were formed. He spent hours observing how different styles of kolams were created in the real world, flipped through pages of old guide books showing how some of these colorful and eye catchy folk art illustrations came to life. Going in search of inspiration, making rough drawings, gathering samples, documenting and putting down thoughts and questioning things are some of the first steps taken while laying down the foundation of any elaborate creative project.
The illustration basically consists of small, intricately drawn decorative elements which are repeated around the center axis.
The patterns extrude outwards from the center. There are also shapes that are superimposed, one on top of the other. The arcs and curves that form each level were manually drawn.
Creating realistic computer generated renders or images of custom made objects is an extremely time consuming and laborious task. The end-to-end process of creating these digital assets includes sketching, story-boarding, style-framing, modelling, texturing, lighting, rigging, animating, rendering and compositing.
Modeling of assets basically involves creating the objects or artifacts from scratch by referencing photographs and drawings.
This is usually is the first step in the process after nailing the sketches and boards. The artist spends time crafting the actual model in the digital world. This involves building the mesh from scratch in an optimized manner using the most traditional modeling techniques. This laborious task has its own perks, as there will be significant creative control and down right ability to art direct with a decent level of specificity. Patiently crafted models with lower polygon count can help reduce render times. Unwrapping of the models to get for ready for texturing is the very next step.
The Kolam series has a strong focus on creating custom texture maps of the folk art and layered mattes that make the output look realistic and believable. Just like how one would paint over a sculpture in real life, there are texturing tools available for projecting images onto the models, in this case repeatable-tiled images or unwrapped texture maps. Anirudh created the vectorized outlines and shapes in Illustrator and brought the exports into Photoshop for coloring and superimposing textures.
Lighting is a very important stage in 3D digital design. The lighting methods followed and soft-box installations present within the work environment of the software mimics real world setups and stages. The light rays, photon count and illumination intensities accurately follow physics and electromagnetic principles. One can literally plug in exact numerical values to each of the light sources and achieve results similar to what you get if you were to light up a real world environment.
Once the props are created, Anirudh spends considerable amount of time building style-frames and developing creative concepts that would visually tell compelling stories which would resonate with audiences. Even something as simple as a static image does an incredible job communicating so much information. The surreal environments where the Kolams are placed in make the digital art, as a whole, look purely imaginative at the same time realistic and believable.
There isn't any rigging done yet for this specific project. Rigging defines the skeletal structure of modeled objects so that they can later be animated and brought to life. It is mostly used to let the software know about where to position the joints and arms of any movable object.
There are of course many intriguing and eye-catchy turbulent cloth simulations and key-framed animations in this collection. The Svarna series, has textured cloth surfaces subjected to dynamic forces that make it swirl and twist in interesting ways. The kolam designs are in the form of embroidered golden threads on black linen.
Defining the geometry
Each segment is created separately and multiplied around a center axis. These are in multiples of 2,4 and 8
45 degrees
8 parts
45 degrees
8 parts
45 degrees
8 parts
Individual elements were duplicated in Illustrator around a center axis. Each element was created separately and modified based on how the overall design looked.
Pulli kolams are formed by connecting dots. Lines used for connecting these dots in creative ways form the main outlines of the motifs and design elements.
Dots are placed above and below, and also to the sides to form a matrix.
This is an art-form that is several centuries old and is commonly found in most parts of South India
Texturing
Sketches of preliminary versions of dotted Kolam and Rangoli patterns are done on paper. Once the designs get to a decent spot, Anirudh then creates the vectorized outlines in illustrator which are sharp without any blurriness. The outlines are colored. Additional black and white mattes are created to be utilized as masks in Cinema 4D for clipping out parts that shouldn't be visible in the renders.
The masks are super-imposed up on procedural noise patterns to give it a natural look.
Particles
There are x-particles simulations in this collection that actually add to the realism of the renders. To achieve powder like effect Anirudh had to run a few tests to see if the results were looking realistic. Making something that's close to reality requires the artist to work within constraints. Everything from speed at which the particles are born to incorporating mild fluid like properties to the Kolam powder was done manually by tweaking built-in physics parameters.
Dynamic simulations
There are built-in physics simulators within the software tool Anirudh uses. Working on tweaking and adjusting physical parameters like gravity, wind turbulence, twirling, soft body effects, fluffiness to match real life phenomena is a timing consuming process and requires multiple iterations. Being able to precisely art direct and have complete control over virtual assets in the digital world helps the designer craft realistic and visually appealing content.
Procedural cloning
Majority of renders have abstract compositions populated with large number of similar objects to increase visual complexity. In order to make these cloned assets look more natural and organic, procedural mathematical noise functions have been leveraged to drive and alter the scaling, rotation and positioning of tiled or repeated objects. These variations result in interesting patterns.
