Credits and licences
Last updated 24 September 2026
Ebru Studio is made by Meriç Dağlı. Everything you see and hear is made for it, or used under a licence that allows it, or old enough to belong to everyone. Here’s all of it.
The craft
Ebru is a living tradition, and the studio stands on it: the classical patterns (battal, gelgit, taraklı, şal, bülbül yuvası, hatip), the flowers of Necmeddin Okyay and Mustafa Düzgünman, the akkâse of the old masters, and the marbling of Japan (suminagashi), Persia (abri), the Deccan and Europe. The demos follow their methods; none of them copies a particular sheet.
The water and its mathematics
The way paint moves on the tray follows the mathematics of marbling worked out by Aubrey Jaffer and his colleagues (Shufang Lu, Aubrey Jaffer and others, “Mathematical Marbling”, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 2012), which also treats combs and pins as exact movements of the water. Amanda Ghassaei’s Digital Marbling showed how beautiful this can be on a screen, and was a guide for this studio. The realistic tray borrows ideas from Evan Wallace’s WebGL Water and Aurélien’s Clearwater (both MIT licensed) for its ripples, and from Adrien Bousseau and colleagues’ interactive watercolour (2006) for the grain of the pigment.
Music
All music and sound is synthesized live in your browser: no recordings or samples. Its scales and forms come from traditions that belong to everyone: Turkish makam and usul, Japanese pentatonic modes, Indian ragas, Javanese and Balinese pelog and slendro, and European harmony. The Turkish tunes it sometimes plays are transcribed from Rauf Yekta Bey’s “La musique turque” in the Encyclopédie de la musique (Paris, 1922), which is in the public domain: his own short pieces in each makam, and a yürük semai by Dede Efendi as he printed it.
Pictures in the demos
Some demos are homages, made in ink on water, to works that are in the public domain: Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889), Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa (about 1831), Claude Monet’s water lilies, Gustav Klimt’s The Tree of Life (1905 to 1909) and Wassily Kandinsky’s Several Circles (1926). Others are in the spirit of a style (op art, De Stijl, early abstract painting) without following any particular work. The science demos after G. I. Taylor’s reversibility experiment (1967), Hassan Aref’s blinking vortex (1984) and Leon Glass’s dot patterns (1969) are our own drawings of the ideas.
Colour palettes
The 31 palettes are colours read from historical sources. Colours themselves belong to no one; the sources are credited here.
- Tarz-ı Kadîm: Classical Ottoman ebru earth and mineral pigments (TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi)
- Lahor Zemin: Ottoman ebru pigments thrown on an indigo-laid ground
- Şam İşi: Iznik "Damascus" ware, c. 1540 to 1555
- Süleymaniye / Rhodes polychrome: Iznik polychrome with bole red and emerald, c. 1560 to 1600
- Kitābkhāna: Safavid Persian manuscript painting, 16th century
- Chrysos: Byzantine gold-ground glass mosaic tesserae
- Zellij Fassi: Fez zellige tilework, Marinid period to 19th century
- Suminagashi: sumi, ai, beni: Japanese suminagashi marbling, Heian to Echizen (Nippon Colors values)
- Kasane: Ume-gasane / Yuki-no-shita: Heian layered robe colours for late winter and spring
- Kasane: Kaede-momiji: Heian layered robe colours for autumn maple
- Wada Sanzō 247 + 286: Wada Sanzō, A Dictionary of Colour Combinations (Haishoku Sōkan)
- Danqing: mineral pigments: Chinese mineral painting palette, Dunhuang to literati (色谱 1957)
- Ru and Ming: Song celadon, Ming blue-and-white: Chinese ceramics: Song Ru ware glazes and early Ming cobalt
- Mughal court atelier: Mughal miniature painting, Akbar to Shah Jahan
- Rajput / Rajasthani: Rajasthani miniature pigments: Mewar, Bundi, Kota, Jaipur
- Old Dutch: 17th to 18th century Dutch combed marbling (Woolnough's Large Dutch)
- French Shell & Fawn: Late 18th to early 19th century Shell and Fawn marbling (Woolnough)
- Blue Stormont & Gloster: English Stormont and Gloster endpaper patterns (Woolnough, 1853)
- Victorian Nonpareil & Spanish: Victorian Nonpareil and Spanish marbled endpapers, post-1840
- Carta Marmorizzata: Italian vein and Florentine marbled paper
- Werner's Cabinet: Werner's Nomenclature of Colours (Syme, 1814)
- Bauhaus Primaries: Itten's colour star (1921) and Kandinsky's form-colour test (1923)
- Falu & Gustavian: Swedish Falu red, Gustavian interiors and Norwegian rosemaling
- Annasethe: Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur, plate 8 (Discomedusae)
- Porpema: Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur, plate 37 (Siphonophorae)
- Abyssal Light: Deep-sea bioluminescence emission peaks (Haddock et al. 2010)
- Mineral Cabinet: Mineral pigments: cinnabar, realgar, orpiment, malachite, azurite, hematite
- Red Beds: Painted Desert, Arizona, and Zhangye Danxia, Gansu
- Ochre and Pipeclay: Aboriginal Australian bark and rock painting four-colour palette
- Bonampak: Classic Maya murals at Bonampak, Chiapas, c. 790 AD
- Paracas to Wari: Andean textile dyes, Paracas Necropolis to Wari
Type
- Google Sans Flex, by Google, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1: every word in the studio.
- Roboto, by Google, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1: the “Continue with Google” button.
- IBM Plex Mono, by IBM, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.
The fonts are served by Google Fonts. The licence is at openfontlicense.org.
Icons
The icons are drawn for the studio, except the settings gear, which is adapted from Feather: Copyright (c) 2013-2023 Cole Bemis, under the MIT License.
The figures the studio paints for everyday things (a cat, a bicycle, a mosque) are silhouettes traced from these icon sets, filled, simplified and rescaled: Noto Emoji, Copyright 2013 Google, Inc., under the Apache License 2.0; Material Design Icons by Pictogrammers, Apache License 2.0; Fluent Emoji, Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation, MIT License; Phosphor Icons, Copyright (c) 2023 Phosphor Icons, MIT License; IconPark by ByteDance, Apache License 2.0; MingCute Icons, Apache License 2.0; Tabler Icons, Copyright (c) 2020-2026 Paweł Kuna, MIT License; Health Icons, Copyright (c) 2021 Resolve to Save Lives, MIT License; and Fluent UI System Icons, Copyright (c) 2020 Microsoft Corporation, MIT License. Each figure names its source icon, and the full licence texts come with them.
Licence notices
Built with Llama. Llama 3.1 is licensed under the Llama 3.1 Community License, Copyright © Meta Platforms, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Something missing?
If you think something here should be credited differently, or shouldn’t be here, write to meric@ebru.studio and it will be fixed.