Gradients

Ridges going pale as they recede — the air between piling up until the far ones are only sky.

Two masses of light leaning against each other, brightest where they still disagree and black where neither reaches.

Glazing bars on a five-fold quasi-periodic grid — ordered everywhere, periodic nowhere; the cursor bows the phase and the whole lattice bends like warm glass.

A bundle of fibres lying almost parallel, lit from one side — the sheen is drawn by where each fibre points, and the cursor combs them.

A hand-coated print: the brush that laid the sensitizer, the dry edge of the coat, and the tooth of the sheet.

Shafts through a slatted window, made visible by dust smeared along the light rather than speckled across it.

Ocean swell under a low sun — three long trains fanned off the heading, and what is drawn is the slope of the water rather than its height, which is why the sea is bands of light and no waves.

A column of smoke drawn up a flue by the curl of a scalar potential — the hand goes into the velocity field rather than the coordinate, so it folds the column the way a draught does and keeps blowing for a beat after the hand stops.

Soft shadows obeying the one rule that makes them soft: the penumbra widens with distance from the occluder and goes fainter as it widens.

Refraction through a height field with one index per channel — the split is in the glass, not painted on.

A pool with a lip — the liquid stands proud at its own edge and bulges where it is touched.

Three slow emitters trading standing waves — bright fringes where the crests agree, black where nothing reaches.

A fire front creeping across a field — char behind it, an ember line, licks above.

A body ringed by its own corona, spikes crawling around the edge where the field is tightest.

Leaf shadow where the coarse canopy casts the softest edge and the small gaps project discs of the sun; the hand moves through it like a breeze.

A uniform stream flowing past bodies that are never drawn — the streamlines are exact everywhere, so they crowd where the flow crowds and have no edge to find.

Thin-film colour over a stretched shell grain — the orders slide as the pointer glances across, pearl one way and blush the other.

A dark body in front of a light, and only the part of the limb facing the source burns.

A film a few wavelengths thick over a slow flowing ground — the interference tint multiplies the palette instead of replacing it, and the cursor thickens the film so colour travels out behind the hand.

Marbled pigment with the warp fed back into itself, veins at one level set and dust drifting along the filaments.

A lighthouse turning inside sea fog — the blades die out where the banks are thick because the light is dimmed by what it crossed, not by how far it came, and a hand held up casts a real shadow that widens and fades as it falls away.

The colour of a temperature: hot metal lights one channel at a time, red then green then blue, and the whole sequence from deep cherry through orange to white falls out of the order they switch on in.

Liquid metal gathering and breaking, holding its own edge the way mercury does.

One broad shaft laid across the frame — the distance to an oriented axis through a tight core and a wide spill, with the far end giving out — and the hand turns the axis.