Kaleido Draw

Kaleido Draw is a symmetry toy. A round plate sits on dark velvet, and whatever you draw on it is repeated around the middle between 2 and 24 times. Turn the mirror on and each segment is folded back on itself as well, so a line drawn once is painted forty-eight times and every wobble of your hand comes out as a petal. Nothing here can go wrong: a shaky circle becomes a rose window, a straight dash becomes a starburst, and a mistake becomes part of the pattern.

There are five ways to make a mark. A solid ink in twelve colours, a rainbow ink whose hue runs along the line as you draw, a gradient ink that fades between two colours and back, a glow brush that adds light instead of paint and burns white where it crosses itself, and an eraser that takes it all back just as symmetrically. The brush runs from a hairline to a fat stripe, with a softness control for anything between a crisp edge and an airbrushed haze — and a stylus is read for pressure, so leaning harder makes a fatter line. Thirty undo steps sit in the bar, along with a slow turn you can switch on so the finished plate revolves like a music box, and a faint segment guide you can hide once you know where the folds are.

When a piece is done, press bloom and the whole thing is replayed from the middle outwards, growing stroke by stroke in the order you drew it. Keep up to six pieces on the shelf inside your browser and open them again another day, or save a square PNG straight to your device. On a phone the plate fills the screen with the tools along the bottom; on a desktop they move to a column at the side. It is a quiet thing to do for ten minutes — somewhere to relax, make something pretty and take it with you.