The festival of Onam in the Indian state of Kerala is celebrated with great pomp and splendour. Among the many events planned to welcome the spirit of the ancient King Maveli, floral patterns called “pookalam” adorn the entrances of homes across the state. Every year at my workplace as well with the exception of last year, all of us get together to produce stunning patterns with flowers and celebrate the festival as one, no matter which culture or country we come from.

I found this beautiful floral mandala on Pinterest which felt like the perfect artwork to pick to commemorate the festival and have our own version of an Onam celebration in our art workshop. It also happens to be our tenth workshop!

We attempted this one in October and yet again I’m playing catch-up to our art workshop results. So with apologies to my eager beaver sisters in the workshop, presenting this one which looked simple and straightforward but was wickedly complex to reproduce!

We decided to only pick the centre of the page and go free hand from that point, the result of which was most of us did not manage to reproduce the design within a round frame. Lesson well learnt!

My eldest sister Bala’s version turned out more square than round (I landed up with a similar situation too!). Her choice of colours though was super bright and puts a nice spin on the original.

My sister Goma used pink paper as a base to come up with this version, she also managed to retain a circular shape.

My sister Lakshmi also managed to get a somewhat round shape with a pastel shade style of colours similar to the original:

And finally, here’s my version. I managed to do a somewhat diamond shaped version rather than round. But I too chose to go with the somewhat lighter shades of colour similar to the original.

As life limps back to normal, our workshops too are becoming few and far between. After the Onam themed flower mandala, we wanted to do something themed around Navratri but instead landed up doing a Diwali themed rangoli design on paper. More on that next time!