T_128
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.03.22, day 84
- Size
- 70 × 140 cm
- Paper
- S6, Qing Yi half-raw
- Inks
- MB1, MB2, MB3
- Phase
- P1 Warm-up
- Shown on the site
- yes (V23 rating of 5.0 or higher)
- Early storage triage
- SA: save, archive (Peter's early system, since retired)
Measured · V23 (v23.8)
- V23 rating
- 6
- Form
- 2
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 2.2
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 2
- Ink cover
- 71%
- Dark share
- 44%
- Tonal steps
- 6
- Flaws named by the reads
- other 8, water stain 4
Peter's own rating
- Rating
- 5
“There is always something that can be done better.”Peter Yuill · 2026.07.02
Older engine
- V7
- 8
How the number was made
Read by the Visual Analysis Engine, version 23.8, on 2026.10.06: measured by code, then read 5 times by Claude Opus 5.5 against three reference paintings (R1 to R3), each read independent of the others. How the engine works.
Three views of one sheet.
Left, the photograph. Centre, the tone stretch the model is shown beside it: the darkest 45% of tones spread over the whole range, so flat black, banding and stains show. Right, every pixel as the measuring code classes it: cyan black ink, deep teal translucent grey, stone the palest ink, near black bare paper.
6 families of tone.
Every inked pixel's brightness in 64 bins, smoothed; each circled peak holds at least 4% of the ink. Life inside the black: 0.060 (under 0.045 reads as flat).
Five reads, agreeing on 4 of 5 qualities.
Each quality placed on its ladder by each read, and the mean the engine keeps. Where reads differ, they differ by one rung; close calls resolve down.
READ 1, IN ITS OWN WORDS
“An energetic sheet like R2. The translucent rectangles are legibly layered and a fluent arc leads the eye, but the dark wedges are bulky and flat and the bottom right is crowded. The surface has minor creases and mottling.”
Left arc stroke tapers fluently to its hooked point; the right black bar and bottom dark wedges are bulky, slab-like fills with stiff rectangular ends.
WEAKEST Blunt dark slab bottom centre-left, filled-in wedge
STRONGEST Curved hooked stroke sweeping left to centre
Grey slabs show grain and graded density, and the top-right mass bands well; the bottom black wedges stay mostly uniform inside. Modulation 0.060 with six tonal steps.
WEAKEST Bottom dark masses largely flat inside
STRONGEST Right grey mass with graded vertical banding
Pale slabs, then mid-grey rectangles, then black strokes and spatter. Overlaps stay translucent and you can read the order across the centre and right.
WEAKEST Bottom-right overlaps thicken toward heavy dark
STRONGEST Translucent grey rectangles stacked under black strokes
Diagonal flow from the left arc through spatter into the right masses; the open top-left paper is shaped by the spray. Bottom right is jammed with stacked blocks.
WEAKEST Crowded bottom-right cluster of overlapping slabs
STRONGEST Diagonal arc carrying eye from left to right
Ink is controlled and spatter is deliberate. Crease lines run through the lower-left greys and there is mild cloudy mottling in the top-right wash, both minor.
WEAKEST Cloudy mottling inside top-right grey mass
STRONGEST Dry-brush spatter and grainy grey wash edges
5 distinct places, 0 major.
Each read must name every flaw and where it is, in a ninth of the sheet. Here the reads named flaws in 5 distinct places, 12 mentions in all across 5 reads; the number in each ninth is how many times a flaw was named there. Reads agreeing on a place strengthen the evidence for one flaw; they do not multiply it.
Measured from the 16-bit master.
The previous engine (V22) measured this sheet's master file: 1 principal ink mass traced (cyan), 5 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 14 edge segments, 29% crisp, 43% soft or bloomed, 29% broken.
Tonal depth held at rung 1.
6 steps: not appliedMaterial held at rung 1. Mild waves in the unmounted paper are never a flaw.
none namedThe rating cannot exceed 4.
lowest 2.0A read that breaks the reply format is discarded.
5 of 5 validV23 rating 6.0.
Engine v23.8, 5 reads. Fixed arithmetic, the same for every painting; the constants were set on 24 randomly chosen paintings so the median sheet scores 5. The scale is relative to this archive, not to painting in general, and a difference of less than half a point between two paintings is noise.