Draw Indian Flag using Python

Ayushi Rawat

Published in

Analytics Vidhya

5 min readJan 27, 2021

Hello, world! This Republic day I tried to do something creative and made an Indian Flag with Turtle using Python.

In this Blog article, we will learn how to Draw Indian Flag. We will see the implementation in Python.

Check out the Repository for Ultimate Resource in python. Drop a star if you find it useful! Got anything to add? Open a PR on the same!

You can refer to my YouTube video Tutorial to see a working tutorial for better Understanding and a step by step Guide of the same.

What will be covered in this Blog

1. Turtle Introduction
2. Creating an Indian Flag with Turtle

Let’s get started!

What is Turtle?

Turtle is a pre-installed Python library. It enables users to create pictures and shapes by providing them with a virtual canvas. The onscreen pen that you use for drawing is called as turtle.

The turtle has three attributes: a location, an orientation (or direction), and a pen.

Moving the Turtle Head

The turtle can move in four directions:

Forward
Backward
Left
Right

If you wish to know more about it, you can refer to Turtle Documentation. Use this link to navigate to the documentation.

Now that you are familiar with our agenda and have acquired basic knowledge of Turtle module, we can move forward to the coding section.

Time to Code!

You can find all the code at my GitHub Repository. Drop a star if you find it useful.

In order to access the Python library, you need to import it into your Python environment, use the following command to import turtleit in your python script.

import turtle
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Starting out, let’s create an instance of turtle.

flag = turtle.Turtle()
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Now let’s define some properties,

Let’s set the speed as 3 using speed method, that means the flag will not just appear on the screen, the drawing will have some animation.
If you wish to change the background colour, you can use the bgcolor method, by default it is white.
You can adjust the pen’s thickness using pensize method, it will be slightly bold.

turtle.speed(3)
#turtle.bgcolor("black")
turtle.pensize(5)

Now let’s define a function to define for movements, I am calling it as draw.

def draw(x, y):
    flag.penup()
    flag.goto(x, y)
    flag.pendown()

So far so good. Now, let’s draw the Ashok Chakra, we need to pick the right colour for it.

flag.color("#054187")

Now, let’s draw the 24 strokes, so for this, I will run the loop 24 times

If we start from the centre, we need to cover 360 degrees, and we got 24 strokes, so that becomes 15 degrees each. We start out from the centre, draw a stroke using forward , trackback to the centre using backward and turn 15 degrees. we repeat the same process 24 times.

for i in range(24):
    flag.forward(80)
    flag.backward(80)
    flag.left(15)
draw(0, -80)

Once done, we can now draw a circle at the edges of the strokes. So earlier, we moved forward and backwards by 80, so we need to consider the same length for the radius of circle i.e 80.

flag.circle( 80, 360)
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Now, if you observe, our turtlehead is pointing at the bottom of a stoke, so

let’s move say 300 or 400
trace backwards twice of it.
We now need to move our cursor by 90 degrees here to we start to face downwards.
Next, we move 200 in the downward direction.
So to complete our rectangle, we need to again turn by 90 left
now we are to face towards left and move twice as distance here
turn again by 90 degree
Finally, move up to complete the rectangle.

Let’s specify the colour here as green

flag.color("green")

Next, let’s make a green rectangle’s outline.

flag.begin_fill()flag.forward(350)
flag.backward(700)
flag.right(90)
flag.forward(200)
flag.left(90)
flag.forward(700)
flag.left(90)
flag.forward(200)
flag.left(90)flag.end_fill()

To fill it entirely with green colour, we are using begin_fill and end_fill method here. let's have a look at what we have got so far!

To fill it entirely with green colour, we are using begin_fill and end_fill method here. Now, it's time to draw the last part, the second rectangle. So, right now, we have cursor at A and we need it at B.

To fill it entirely with green colour, we are using begin_fill and end_fill method here.

Now, it’s time to draw the last part, the second rectangle.

Let’s change the colour to orange.
And right now, we have cursor at A and we need it at B, let’s call the draw method for the same.

flag.color("orange")
draw(-350, 80)

Let’s follow the same procedure and draw an orange rectangle.

flag.begin_fill()flag.right(180)
flag.forward(700)
flag.left(90)
flag.forward(200)
flag.left(90)
flag.forward(700)
flag.left(90)
flag.forward(200)flag.end_fill()

It should look something like this.

With these steps, we have successfully Drawn an Indian Flag using Python. That’s it!

Simple, isn’t it? Hope this tutorial has helped. I would strongly recommend you to Check out the YouTube video of the same and don’t forget to subscribe to my Channel.

You can play around with the turtle library and even explore more features.

You can find all the code at my GitHub Repository. Drop a star if you find it useful.

Thank you for reading, I would love to connect with you at Twitter | LinkedIn.

Do share your valuable suggestions, I appreciate your honest feedback!

You should definitely check out my other Blogs:

Resources:

docs.python.org/3/library/turtle.html

See you in my next Blog article, Take care!!