Soft Boil — six minutes, and you cannot get it wrong

This is a submission for Frontend Challenge - Comfort Food Edition, CSS Art . Inspiration My other two entries were about a moment and a ritual. This one is about the opposite: the dish you fall back on when you have no skill, no energy and no plan. Boiled eggs are what you make when you cannot cook. Six minutes, one pan,and the comfort is precisely that it is not possible to get it wrong . Two choices made it worth drawing rather than just worth eating. A glass bowl, so you can see the boil. In a steel pan the interesting half of this is hidden. Glass also turned out to be the exact opposite problem to the terracotta in my chai piece — unglazed clay is matte and forgives a sloppy gradient, glass shows you every single one. An induction hob, for the light. I finished the fridge piece saying the one piece of advice I'd give is pick a scene with a light source in it . So I did it again on purpose. The element ring is the only warm thing in an otherwise cold grey kitchen, and it lights the water from underneath. Everything here is a div , a gradient or a shadow. No SVG, no images, no canvas. Demo Press Turn off the heat and give it a few seconds. The ring dies back, the bubbles thin out, and the eggs slowly stop moving — then put it back on and watch the pan come to the boil in stages. That build-up is the part I'd most like you to see, and it's the whole subject of this post. Journey Nothing in this picture is transparent The obvious way to draw a glass bowl is backdrop-filter . I'd advise against building a picture on it — support is uneven enough that the piece falls apart somewhere, and it's expensive. So the transparency is painted. The water is drawn first as its own element, and then a front wall of highlights sits over the top of it: two vertical speculars down the sides for the curve of the glass, a soft wash across the middle for the thickness of the pane, and a rolled lip at the top, which is the one place glass is genuinely opaque enough to draw as a solid.