Catalogue / Plate 35← All plates
A tray of ink you can comb
A live fluid tray: drop inks, comb them, take the paper home.
Sampleton Marbling StudioInk on thickened water, one sheet at a time
Your ink recipe
Put some ink on the tray. The recipe is measured from the tray a moment after it settles.
Drops 0. Strokes 0. Comb passes 0. Drag on the tray to work with the pointer; the buttons do the same by keyboard.
Remake it
Build one interactive web page: Sampleton Marbling Studio. Ink floats on thickened water in a real fluid simulation on the GPU. Drop ink and it pushes the others aside, drag a comb or stylus through it and the colours feather, then download the sheet as a print-size picture with its ink recipe measured from the tray. Set it on an invented business called Sampleton, with its own drawn or generated pictures and no one else's files. It suits: A craft shop, stationer, bookbinder or print studio that sells made-to-order paper, cards or wrap, where seeing your own sheet beforehand is the sale. Do not let it fail the way this kind of piece usually does: A fluid toy with nothing to take away, and a simulation that gives up silently. Here every action also has a button, the sheet downloads at print size, the recipe is measured from the pixels not asserted, and a browser without the needed GPU support is told so and still gets the inks list and recipe. It must work with the keyboard, on a phone, with reduced motion respected and no text under 12px. Tell me which libraries you chose and why.
Notes: when it suits, when it does not, how it fails
- When it suits
- A craft shop, stationer, bookbinder or print studio that sells made-to-order paper, cards or wrap, where seeing your own sheet beforehand is the sale.
- When it does not
- Anyone who needs an exact, repeatable colour match: marbling is chaotic and every sheet differs. Pages that must run on very low-end phones.
- How it fails
- A fluid toy with nothing to take away, and a simulation that gives up silently. Here every action also has a button, the sheet downloads at print size, the recipe is measured from the pixels not asserted, and a browser without the needed GPU support is told so and still gets the inks list and recipe.
Built for Pete's request for something far more impressive: a GPU fluid simulation (stable fluids) used for a real job, with premultiplied ink so colours displace rather than blend to mud.