A few sample kolams rendered in Kolam Studio.
Kolam Studio implements a system for describing kolams as planar graphs.
Right now the kolams are drawn with line segments, not smooth curves. However, they are still useful as guidelines for tracing.
Kolams are Indian drawings of closed curves around a grid of dots. They are drawn in colored powder on the ground to bring prosperity to the home.
While drawing kolams on paper, I realized that they could be described as planar graphs. The curves around dots correspond to edges connecting the dots in a graph. With this system, arbitrary graphs can be rendered as kolams, not just rectangular grids.
This program can generate rectangular or triangular grids of points, and allows the user to place points arbitrarily.
I found later that my graph system was not original. The paper "Fundamental Study on Design System of Kolam Pattern" (Kiwamu Yanagisawa and Shojiro Nagata, 2007) analyzes them the same way, although it focuses on the traditional rectangular grid patterns of kolams.