Mirror ink

How to play Mirror ink

Draw anywhere on the canvas and every stroke is repeated around the centre, so a single squiggle becomes a ring of squiggles. Choose how many sectors you want (anything from two up to sixteen), turn the extra mirroring on or off for a different feel, and pick a brush size. There are eight palettes of eight colours, from neon reef to ink and gold, and one of them is picked out for you each day. The sun button switches the canvas between glowing neon on black and flat ink on paper, which changes how every colour reads. Undo steps back one stroke at a time and clear wipes the lot. When you have made something you like, download it as a PNG. There is no score, no timer and nothing to finish, which is rather the point.

Tips

• Start near the middle, small movements there create the biggest patterns
• Fewer sectors give bold shapes, more sectors give lace
• Neon makes crossings glow, paper keeps deep colours deep, try the same drawing on both
• A slow curve looks far better than a fast scribble, let the mirroring do the work

About Mirror ink

Symmetry drawing is one of the oldest tricks for making something that looks good with no skill at all. Fold a paper, drop some ink, press it flat and you have a butterfly. Mirror ink is that idea with a lot more axes and an undo button. Because every stroke is copied around the middle, your hand only ever has to make one nice line and the maths handles the rest, which is why the results tend to look like stained glass or snowflakes rather than doodles. It works particularly well on a phone with a finger. There is nothing to complete, so treat it as somewhere to put your hands while you think about something else.

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