David Li introduced Splash Canvas, an interactive, multimodal web painting experiment in which chatty sea creatures act as brushes and offer playful critiques as you paint.
David Li, a Google Arts & Culture collaborator known for Blob Opera and Viola the Bird, built Splash Canvas to run in the browser and to combine procedural painting physics, local neural cellular automata, real-time machine learning and generative AI dialogue powered by Gemini and Chirp.
The system models virtual liquid so strokes spread and colours mix like real paint, it synthesises soundscapes from brush motion for immediate sensory feedback, and the creature-brushes steer and comment on your work as you go.
Li’s earlier experiments have had wide reach: Blob Opera’s blobs were stretched more than 100 million times across over 200 countries, and Viola the Bird has reached millions of listeners.
The Google Arts & Culture Lab said the project is part of its long-term program supporting artists who experiment with advanced technologies to create playful online learning experiences.
Splash Canvas is available to try in a web browser today.
