Reflections in shadows

I was studying in my room one morning when I discovered some interesting shadow patterns my pen was making. It happened that my curtains were barely open and let in a narrow beam of sunlight.

I found it interesting particularly because the reflection patterns were in the shadows.

After some exploration, I discovered that the reason for these patterns is the small scratches on the shiny surface of the pen tip.

To replicate this, I tried to make subtle patterns with mylar, and used foam core to replicate my curtains. The challenge was finding the right scale for the mylar patterns and position of the light to elicit interesting reflection patterns.

^ it gets pretty crazy when you shine lasers on it!

Sebastian mentioned it might be interesting to move this back to natural sunlight.

It's interesting, again, to observe how a shadow brings out the reflections more. 

Moving forward, I'm working on a "create your own" reflection patterns. It seems like it'd be really cool to have these objects outside, and allow people to move them around and explore using their bodies as shadows. The natural sunlight removes the burden on the user of having to shine the flashlight at just the right angle, and allows more expressive exploration.