  In splat painting, a collection of liquid droplets is projected onto the
substrate by imposing a controlled acceleration to a paint-loaded brush. To
unravel the physical phenomena at play in this artistic technique, we perform a
series of experiments where the amount of expelled liquid and the resulting
patterns on the substrate are systematically characterized as a function of the
liquid viscosity and brush acceleration. Experimental trends and orders of
magnitude are rationalized by simple physical models, revealing the existence
of an inertia-dominated flow in the anisotropic, porous tip of the brush. We
argue that splat painting artists intuitively tune their parameters to work in
this regime, which may also play a role in other pulsed flows, like violent
expiratory events or sudden geophysical processes.
