Rangoli is an ancient Indian decoration art- usually these colorful decorations can be seen in homes around Deepavali.
How to make Rangoli using colored rice:
Preparing the Colored Rice:
There are ready made rice sold at stores- but of course it is more expensive. You can make your own colored rice at home. All you need is rice and water/ poster colours.
1. Buy rice- the broken rice (beras pecah) from grocery store or stores like Tesco. These broken rice are the lower grade of rice. If you cannot get the broken rice, buy the usual rice (the cheapest you can get) and grind or pound them (no need to pound too fine).
2. Mixed the paint color that you like and soak the rice in the paint water. There is not fixed time to soak- but the longer you soak, the darker the rice will be.
3. Dry the colored rice under the sun for 2 days before using. It’s important to ensure the rice is dried properly before using.
Making the Rangoli:
1. The pattern- you can obtain inspiration from various designs such as light, shapes and peacock. Google the Rangoli designs via Google image and you can get some good designs off the web. In the case below, my creative colleagues drew a picture of a peacok freehand. As we are on carpeted floor, they drew on sugar paper and use double sided tape to tape on the carpet. During taping, ensure that you make the surface as smooth as possible- because any surface that are uneven would cause the rice to flow or move away from location.
2. Then, sprinkle the colored rice at designated columns. You may notice through the pictures that they had labeled the colors at different part of the peacock’s body.
Then, just sprinkle accordingly. There is an art to do it- my colleagues (actually 2 ladies were working on it) really do it with finesse as they do their own Rangolis at home (but on a tiled floor)
Above: The Rangoli- one has to be creative because the mind must be able to visualise the finished product well.
They drew some patterns at the edge. They said it would have been better if they had rice of different tones but due to time constraint (since next Friday would be Deepavali), they made the best with what they had.
Managed to take the picture of the finished product later:
There are various simple videos available in YouTube too where you can make simple designs:
