Discover India through Art and Design

Posted on Mar 19th 2010 | 5comments

Recently, I came across a video on YouTube where some students from Northern Illinois University (USA) asked people about their first thoughts on India. Surprisingly, most people knew very little about India and that too because of the Oscar winning movie Slumdog millionaire. Here’s the video:

This video inspired me to come up with something which could tell the world much more about India and its rich culture. The best thing I can do as a designer is to tell about India’s culture though art and design. Hence, I decided to come up with a series of articles about art and design in India’s culture. I have also named this series as – “Discover India through art and design”. In fact, I also came up with a simple logo for this series!

I would be designing each and everything in this series and would also explain how the design was made along with the historical and cultural significance behind each design.

Following is a partial list of all the topics which I would be covering in this series:

1. Rangoli Designs

2. Art and Design in castles and temples (Examples, remakes and inspired designs)

3. Handicraft Designs

4. Temple Architectural Design (In-depth analysis with CAD)

5. Sculptures in India

6. Typography for various Indian scripts

7. A deep look into various art forms from India

8. Implementing Indian art and designs in webistes

I would be also uploading each design to my flickr photostream

Let us begin with the most common art form of India – “Rangoli”. Rangoli designs can be found in nearly each and every home of India during big festivals like Diwali or Pongal . Rangoli’s are usually made with colored powder or colored sand. The designs are symbolic and common to the entire country, and can include geometrical patterns, with lines, dots, squares, circles, triangles; the swastika,lotus, trident, fish, conch shell, footprints (supposed to be of goddess Lakshmi), creepers, leaves, trees, flowers, animals and anthropomorphic figures.

As quoted from swastikrangoli.com, Rangoli also known as Kolam in southern India, Chowkpurana in northern India, Mandana in Rajasthan, Aripana in Bihar, Alpana in Bengal. It is the ancient hindu religious floor art. According to a legend recorded in Chitra Lakshana, the earliest treatise on Indian painting, a King and his kingdom were steeped in sorrow at the death of the high priest’s son. Everyday he prayed to the Lord Brahma who moved by the prayer and asked the king to paint a portrait of the body on the floor so that he could breathe life in to it. And with that the art of floor painting came to life; and that is how the stone powder, rice four and flowers were transformed in to picturesque offerings to God in the form of floor painting.

The designs are either made free-hand or with the help of a grid. As web designers are quite familiar with the grid system, I would first like to begin with a grid based geometric design.

First of all, we will have to decide the size of the grid. In Rangoli designs, the grid is made by placing equal number of dots in each row/column.

For this design, I have opted for a 17 x 17 grid, that is, 17 points in each row and column as shown below:

After the gird is defined, you simply have to join the dots to make your desired design.

Color it and it’s done!

I have covered a very simple geometric design in this post. I would be covering various other geometric and organic designs in future posts.

I hope you have enjoyed this post. Looking forward for your suggestions to make this series more useful and exciting!

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