Cornflour flakes

Sometimes, art just happens. Out of the blue, or in this case, red, beauty can spring unexpectedly. The mundane can become the exact opposite. Here's how.

I've always been fascinated with the stranger parts of physics, the bits where we find out just how amazing the universe is by discovering just how wierd it can be. Well, adding water to cornflour and producing a rheoplaxic fluid is one example. This is a fluid that becomes stiffer when you stress it, instead of the thixotropic thinning that you find in some paints. So I'd been playing with a mixture of cornflour and water, plus red food colouring just to avoid the whiteness of plain cornflour, and it had been great fun.

But then I didn't know what to do with it when I had finished. Previous experiments with leaving it in the fridge proved that it got cold and took quite a time to start to go mouldy, neither of which seemed to be particularly useful, so this time I left it out in the open. What happened is quite nice. Really nice, in fact.

I'm tempted to try it again...