Art meets physics

Japanese artist Akiko Nakayama manipulates alcohol and inks to create tree-like dendritic patterns during a live painting session.

Dissipation in a Newtonian fluid (left) and an elastoviscoplastic fluid (right). Solid regions are shown in grayscale and liquid regions are shown in color. 

Snapshots of the ink droplets containing 50 vol% alcohol (isopropanol) as they spread on a surface coated with 400 μm-thick acrylic paint with different paint concentrations (11%, 20% and 33%), captured over approximately 40 seconds. The images on the rightmost column show the zoomed-in views of the droplet edges. Higher paint concentration leads to increasingly refined and fractal-like droplet edges.