The Ink Diffusion Mode: Watercolour That Dries at the Edge

Ink Diffusion is the softest look in the Bloom engine: watercolour blooms spread in a rosette, pigment pooling at each drying front. It was redesigned in October 2026, along with the rest of Bloom, and this guide describes the redesigned mode.

Where a drop lands

Drops fall on the rays of a rosette, one ray per fold of the Symmetry control, each placement jittered so the rosette does not read as a stencil. The Growth rate control turns the whole rosette slowly. The turn is integrated against the engine's growth clock rather than multiplied by it, so moving the control, or binding it to the music, changes how fast the rosette turns without making it jump.

Why the edge is darker than the middle

Real watercolour pools at its drying front: the water carries pigment outward and leaves it where the edge stops. The mode paints the same thing, a translucent body with a denser ring of pigment at its front. Past the front there is a bleed, a wider and fainter bloom where pigment crept beyond the edge; Wake length sets how far it reaches. Seeds sets how many blooms share the frame.

What the beat touches

Fronts that are still moving catch the light. On a kick, the fronts inside the subject disc light up together, and nothing outside it flashes, so the beat stays local and the frame never pulses as a whole. Behind the blooms sits an out-of-focus plane, which gives the frame depth without a second subject competing with the first.

When to reach for it

Ambient, neoclassical, downtempo, spoken word, and anything where the visual is a wash rather than a readout. It is one of the calmer of the 370 modes in the catalogue, and it is composed for every export shape, because a rosette is a distribution around a centre rather than a wide horizontal arrangement.

Open Ink Diffusion in the gallery or go to the editor.