The fact that oil and water don't mix is what created this image. I covered a table with a colorful Mexican blanket. Put two glass tumblers on it. Balanced a glass baking dish on the glasses. Then I added water and oil to the baking dish. When the liquids settled down, I used a macro lens to take a very close up photo of the oil drops.
I then used an app call Topaz studio to apply a "Subtly Squiggly" filter to the image. Any squiggles you see within the drops is due to that. The colors are from the striped blanket. Back in Photoshop I used another filter to help define the edges of the oil drops just a bit more. It sort of looks like something from outer space.
This assignment from Learning to See Creatively by Bryan Peterson was a fun first step, but I need to try again using a more pristine baking dish. This one has seen a lot of action over the years, so it has many pits and scratches. It was a challenge to find the clearest glass and also to control the oil so the drops were directly under the camera. For macro, the subject is just an inch or so from the lens. In this case, the camera had to be parallel to the table, using a tripod, and situated so as not to fall into the oil and water mixture. Fortunately I didn't drop the camera, otherwise it would have been an expensive lesson in creativity!