Marble Ink

What it is

Marble Ink is a paper marbling tray that runs in your browser. Paper marbling — suminagashi in Japan, ebru in Turkey — floats ink on a still bath and lifts the pattern onto a sheet, and this is that tray: tap to drop a ring of ink and every earlier ring is pushed aside to make room, the way real ink behaves on water.

There is no fluid simulation. Every drop is a polygon and every tool is an exact closed-form map of the plane, following Aubrey Jaffer's mathematical marbling — so rings never tear or self-intersect, and the pattern stays crisp however many times you comb it.

The tools are the real ones. A stylus dragged through the bath displaces the sheet along the drag, falling off with the square of the distance from it; a rake is a row of tines pulled in one direction, each with its own falloff, balanced so the net flow is zero and the tray never drains at one edge. The nonpareil, gel-git and bouquet chips are the historical comb patterns marblers have used on endpapers for centuries. Because each is a closed-form map rather than a simulation step, the whole sheet updates in one pass no matter how much ink is already floating on it — which is what lets you keep combing a busy tray without it turning to mud.

The order you work in is the whole craft. Ink dropped early sits underneath and gets stretched thin by everything that follows; ink dropped last stays fat and legible on top. The sheet you arrive on is already finished rather than blank — stones, a gel-git pass there and back, then a nonpareil comb, baked from a seeded sequence so everyone opens the same tray — and Reseed deals another one. Clear is the empty bath, for starting the order yourself.

How to use it

• Tap the tray to drop a ring of ink.
• Drag to pull a stylus through the bath.
• Tap a rake — nonpareil, gel-git, bouquet — to pull it across the whole tray.
• Reseed for a fresh sheet, Clear for an empty bath.

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See every experiment