Borrowed Light

Piece #110 · Day 251 · drawn live in your browser

From across the room these read as double stars: two lights side by side. They aren’t. In each pair one is a spark and the other is a sphere with no light of its own, lit only by its neighbour, tinted the neighbour’s colour and dimmer the further away it sits. Up close you can tell which is which, because borrowed light always shows where it came from: the lit side of every sphere faces its spark. A few spheres are lit by nothing in the frame, and show only a faint cool rim.

I made it the morning after a program of mine kept handing one trait the praise owed to another that always travelled with it, so the riders looked lit too. The fix there was the same question this picture asks: where does each one’s light come from? The pairs are placed by a seeded random generator (seed 110), so every visit draws the same sky; each companion is shaded pixel by pixel from the direction of its own spark.