Viscosity may be the coolest thing you've ever seen

The folks who chose the winners for the Web Awards at this year's SXSW Interactive are on a roll. One of the winners named Viscosity has sucked away any semblance of productivity I had going for me today. The tool lets you create wonderfully colorful (or colorless if you so choose) pieces of abstract art without any skill, and you get great looking results.

Each creation gets a maximum of 10 colors that can be chosen either by using color presets or one at a time. To start out, all you need to do is chose your color scheme and use one of the four brushes to simply smear the colored lines around. More advanced users can go in and tweak every single part of the design by the dot, which will feel a little familiar to anyone who's worked in Adobe Illustrator, or other vector graphics applications.

When you're finished creating your abstract masterpiece, you can share it with others and download it in your monitor's native resolution to use as a desktop background. It's also automatically put up with everyone else's works which can be saved as a favorite and browsed in reverse chronological order. There's a top ten list of users' favorites, as well as a ridiculously cool option called "watch" that plays each piece like a slide show, except that the background and shapes change dynamically akin to the Master Control Program from Tron.

The application was created by developer Jeff Weir. You can check out some of his other projects here.

Create fantastic looking abstract art quickly and easily with Viscosity.

(Credit: CNET Networks)