For "Moons", I was clearly inspired by the phases of the moon: over the past few days, feeling guility at not having published anything since August, I could see the moon clearly at night right outside the window of my apartment. What struc me was how it not only changed phases but also changed position, even as I was going to bed at the same time each night. During the day, I was also inspired by the shadow of the bead string from my shades -- the beads themselves were perfectly circular but their shadows cast an elongated oval onto my wall.
Sometimes I cut out part of the circles to make them look like moons, but other times I didn't. Sometimes I'd put another colored circle inside the cutout; sometimes I'd leave it empty.
This is the first piece I created with a completely fixed palette -- I limited myself to yellow-orange, blue, brown, and purple.
I used OpenAI's newest model, "o1", for reasoning to help me with some issues related to getting the 'shear' effect right. Unfortunately, I didn't actually end up using this, but I'm glad I know how to do it for future projects.
Meta: this was the first project in which I used ajis.io instead of the editor at editor.p5js.org. I like it better because it has better syntax highlighting, feels and looks just like VSCode, and has a built-in AI assistant (bring your own key, though).