Marbled

Paper marbling in the browser: float drops of ink, drag them with a stylus or comb them into feathers, then pull a print to keep.

Marbling is an old craft: drops of paint float on thickened water, they are drawn into patterns with a stylus and combs, and a sheet of paper lifts the pattern off in one go. Marbled is a tray you can play with in the same way, and every pattern ends as a print you can download.

How it works

There is no fluid simulation here. Every blot of ink is a closed outline, and the craft is done with geometry. A new drop pushes every older outline outwards exactly as ink spreads on the size, using the area-preserving transform from the paper Mathematical Marbling (Lu, Jaffer and others). The stylus and the comb drag outlines through the water with a smooth falloff, and outlines are resampled after every move so their edges stay crisp however far they stretch.

Because ink never mixes, colours stay clean, and the tray behaves like the real thing: drops are lower plips the bigger they are, the comb swishes, and pulling a print rustles like paper. Choose a palette, build up rings, comb once for a nonpareil or twice for feathers.

Built with

Vector outlines and area-preserving transforms (Mathematical Marbling)
Canvas 2D rendering and PNG export of the print
Web Audio API for the water and paper sounds