Black Hole Doodles

 I began by drawing a grid in perspective, and after about three attempts, just pulled out the digital camera and took a photo of a 1" x 1" grid already built for another project, and then drew a trio of black holes on it, experimenting with various Photoshop brushes.  Then, when attempting to have them merge into one GINORMOUS black hole in Photoshop using the "pinch" distortion tool, I found it less than satisfying.  However, the images did offer a potential for some random animation, which still seeks an explanation.  

And here we go - the grid - (boring):

The grid, in distorted perspective, with three black holes drawn in, manually distorting the grid for this purpose:

(c) 2021 Jim Middleton, The Animating Apothecary

Then a few further distortions in Photoshop, 25 of which were rendered out as jpgs in Photoshop after use of the "pinch" tool, then brought into Vegas 15 to build a rough animation test, for no other reason than to build a rough animation test:

(c) 2021 Jim Middleton, The Animating Apothecary

Now to create a series of sequential images to show the merger of the three black holes.  I think the hand-drawn method may still work best.