Inkblot Bloom

How to make an inkblot

Drag anywhere on the paper. Ink lands under your cursor and is mirrored across the centre at the same instant, so the shape grows outward in balanced halves without you having to think about symmetry at all. Draw slowly and the ink pools into fat, round blooms that spread as they settle. Flick fast and the same stroke breaks up into thin, scattered splatter — speed is read directly off your pointer, so a single gesture that starts slow and whips outward produces a heavy centre with a fine spray at the end. That contrast is the main thing worth playing with.

The symmetry control changes how many times the ink is folded. Two-fold is the classic left-and-right Rorschach mirror. Four- and six-fold fold it again around the centre, and the result stops looking like a butterfly and starts looking like a snowflake or a stained glass rose window. The brush slider sets how wide each deposit lands, from a fine nib up to a broad loaded brush. Space cycles the ink colour, [ and ] resize the brush, and 2, 4 and 6 jump straight to a symmetry mode.

There are six inks — black, vermilion, deep teal, indigo, ochre and plum — and each deposit goes down slightly translucent, so crossing one colour over another tints the overlap instead of covering it, and fast strokes land lighter than slow ones. Mono mode locks everything to black if you want the traditional look. On a phone the same gestures apply: paint with one finger, two-finger tap to change colour, and physically shake the device to wipe the paper clean.

Why it looks like real ink

Each blob is drawn from a seeded random shape rather than a circle, so no two deposits are identical and nothing repeats in a way your eye can catch. While a stroke is live the ink is drawn hard-edged and cheap, but the moment it settles it is repainted with a soft edge — that single change is what reads as ink bleeding into damp paper instead of a shape pasted on top of it. The paper itself carries a faint grain, baked once underneath everything, which is why the cream background does not look flat.

Everything is composed on a large square buffer and exported at 1600 pixels, comfortably bigger than the canvas on screen, so a saved blot holds up as a print source or a full-width background rather than only as a thumbnail.

Who it is for

It is for people who want to make something good-looking in about fifteen seconds with no skill and no setup. There is nothing to score, no way to make a bad one, and no undo to agonise over — if you dislike a blot you clear it and the next one is different. Makers use the exported PNGs as backgrounds, packaging art, book covers and print sources. Everyone else uses it as a fidget.

The mirror is a transform, not a copy

Every deposit of ink is drawn once per sector, with the canvas transform changed between draws. Nothing is copied, flipped or reflected after the fact. The origin is moved to the centre of the square buffer first, and from there two-fold flips one of its two sectors horizontally — which puts the mirror line down the vertical centre, the classic left-against-right fold. Four-fold adds a second flip on the other axis, so the ink is mirrored across the vertical and the horizontal centre lines at the same time. Six-fold works differently again: three copies rotated a third of a turn from each other, each paired with a reflection, giving three mirror lines sixty degrees apart and the rose-window look. Because the folding happens at draw time rather than as a pass over the finished image, changing symmetry mid-drawing leaves everything already on the paper exactly as it was — only the new ink follows the new rule.

Why a fast stroke throws satellites

A deposit is never a circle. Each one is given eight to fourteen vertices at evenly spaced angles, every one pushed in or out by up to 28 percent, then joined with quadratic curves through their midpoints into a smooth, closed, slightly lopsided loop. Wetness comes from a swap: while a blob is still expanding it is filled flat on a scratch layer, because that is cheap to redraw sixty times a second, but the instant it finishes growing it is painted once more onto the ink layer with a radial fill that stays fully opaque out to 78 percent of its radius and then falls away to a tenth of that at the rim. That soft outer fifth of the edge is the entire illusion of ink soaking into damp paper.

Speed changes four things at once. Your pointer velocity is measured in buffer pixels per millisecond, smoothed across frames, and compared against a ceiling of five; the resulting figure shrinks the blob to about a third of its slow-stroke size, lightens it, makes it bloom quicker and tightens the spacing between deposits along the line. The splatter, though, is a separate rule entirely. Past the halfway mark on that speed scale, each deposit also flings three to five much smaller satellites — between a twelfth and a quarter of the parent's size — at a random angle within about fifty degrees either side of your direction of travel, and the faster you are moving, the further out they land. That is why a flick sprays rather than simply thinning: the line is not breaking up, it is shedding.

Where the shape comes from

Hermann Rorschach, a Swiss psychiatrist, published his inkblot test in 1921, and the folded-ink shape has carried his name ever since — which is why a mirrored blot reads instantly as "a Rorschach" even to people who have never sat one. To be completely clear about what this page is: it is a drawing toy. The shapes here come from a random number generator and the movement of your hand, they have no relationship to the standardised plates Rorschach published, and nothing you happen to see in one of them means anything at all about you. Finding animals and faces in ambiguous shapes is just something human eyes do.

What the exported file actually is

Download PNG does not screenshot the canvas. It builds a fresh square canvas, fills it with the cream paper colour, and scales the ink layer up onto it from the 1024-pixel buffer everything is composed at.

Size

1600 × 1600 pixels, square, PNG.

Background

Flat cream, not transparent — the export paints the paper colour in first, and the grain and vignette you see on screen live on a separate layer that is not included.

Filename

Carries the symmetry mode and a timestamp, so a folder of them stays sortable.

Destination

Your downloads folder. The file is assembled in the page and handed straight to the browser; there is no upload step anywhere in the process.

At 1600 square it is large enough to hold up as a print source, a full-bleed phone wallpaper or a listing background rather than only a thumbnail. If you need transparency you will have to knock the cream out in an editor — it is baked in deliberately so the file looks the same wherever it is dropped. The separate Share card button builds a different image instead: 1080 pixels wide, with the blot on top and a dark caption band underneath.