Fluid painting mirrors life.

You prepare your space, choose pigments and mediums of viscosity, mix carefully, and layer them thoughtfully into a cup, which is poured, with intention, on canvas. It spreads rapidly, colors blooming through colors, so you must get your hands dirty--tilting the canvas to guide the flow--until it's perfect, and your fingers are coated in prismatic swirls of paint. You run a small torch over the top to remove any bubbles. Meticulous. Planned. Perfect. You leave it to dry.

In the hours it takes to set, the paint continues to move. Inch by inch, all your intentions slowly slide like lava beneath a thin crust, eventually reaching the edge of the canvas, where it falls in thick drips to the plastic catch-tub below. You cannot control this. Chaos is inevitable. Whatever you have envisioned, directed, and loved--it will change.

You discover some of your favorite parts have ended up wasted, dried in a heap at the bottom of the catch-tub. These are called "skins," and they're meant to be scraped off and thrown away. You feel an uncomfortable kinship with them. They should have been something great. You chose them, you did everything right. Yet there they are. Wasted potential. Meant to be thrown away.

You find if you peel them up, the coating on the tub has given their underside a secret, glass-like shine. The impact of their fall made the layers of paint inside them explode from the center like a galaxy, full of stars. You find you like them better than the painting itself. You start making paintings just to explore the bits that escape.

You begin to collect them.

You curate them. You collage them onto portraits of broken, proud, beautiful people--familiar people--people who were meant to be someone, who did everything right, and in life's chaos, slipped off the edge as wasted potential, meant to be scraped off and thrown away. You dress them in skins as rebellion, as refusal, as royal armor.

You're different, now.

One day, you discover AI, and see that it too mirrors life. Planning. Chaos. Curation. Self.

Digital skins. Truth is the same, wherever you find it.

You make a piece that reminds you how you got here, and you give it to a friend.