---
title: "T_131, full record | Crucible Year"
url: https://peteryuill.art/archive/works/T_131
description: "Crucible Year: a continuous year of sumi ink painting on paper by Peter Yuill, begun 29 December 2025."
source: generated from the Crucible Year master database
---

Archive · full record

# T_131

[The work as shown](https://peteryuill.art/works/T_131). 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:** 5
- **Form:** 2
- **Tonal depth:** 2
- **Layering:** 2
- **Composition:** 2
- **Material and surface:** 1
- **Ink cover:** 74%
- **Dark share:** 35%
- **Tonal steps:** 5

- **Flaws named by the reads:** bloom 5, tide line 1, water stain 8, other 3

The V23 rating runs from 1 to 9, with 5 the middle of this body of work. It is the engine's reading, and the reference the archive is measured against.

## Older engine

- **V7:** 9

From an earlier engine (V7). Its scale differs from V23's, so it is only ever compared with other readings by the same engine.

## 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](https://peteryuill.art/method).

WHAT THE CODE SEES

## 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.

![T_131]

![T_131, tone-stretched]

![T_131, classed by brightness]

74% of the sheet carries ink

TONAL STEPS

## 5 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: 0.053 (under 0.045 reads as flat).

FIVE READS

## Five reads, one answer.

Each quality placed on its ladder by each read, and the mean the engine keeps.

READ 1 READ 2 READ 3 READ 4 READ 5 MEAN

Form 2 BUILT 2 BUILT 2 BUILT 2 BUILT 2 BUILT 2.0

Tonal depth 2 MODELLED 2 MODELLED 2 MODELLED 2 MODELLED 2 MODELLED 2.0

Layering 2 LEGIBLE 2 LEGIBLE 2 LEGIBLE 2 LEGIBLE 2 LEGIBLE 2.0

Composition 2 WORKING 2 WORKING 2 WORKING 2 WORKING 2 WORKING 2.0

Material and surface 1 FLAWED 1 FLAWED 1 FLAWED 1 FLAWED 1 FLAWED 1.0

### READ 1, IN ITS OWN WORDS

“This is an ordinary layered sheet. The crescent stroke and diagonal flow work, but the grey slabs are blunt and the upper dark mass is cloudy and blotchy, which pulls down the surface.”

Form · BUILT

The upper-right crescent and the diagonal dart at centre-left follow the brush. The left and bottom-right grey slabs are bulky, wedge-like fills.

WEAKEST Bottom-right grey slab, blunt rectangular block

STRONGEST Sweeping dark crescent stroke across upper right

Tonal depth · MODELLED

Five tonal steps. The dark mass at top right shows graded tone and banded arcs, and the left block has feathered gradation. The bottom-right block is mostly even grey.

WEAKEST Bottom-right grey slab, fairly flat interior

STRONGEST Upper-right dark mass with cloudy grading and arcs

Layering · LEGIBLE

Translucent grey planes sit under the darker crescent and the dart strokes and can still be read where they overlap. The top-right mass is murky in places.

WEAKEST Upper-right dark mass partly clouds the earlier passes

STRONGEST Crescent stroke laid over translucent grey planes

Composition · WORKING

Ink covers about 74% of the sheet. The masses step diagonally upward to the right. The upper right is heavy and the bottom-left paper is weakly shaped.

WEAKEST Bottom-left empty paper reads as leftover

STRONGEST Diagonal flow from left dart to right crescent

Material and surface · FLAWED

The dark mass at top right has a cloudy, mottled wash with blotches and a ragged bleed edge at top centre. There are drip spots at the far right and grey staining across the paper.

WEAKEST Cloudy, blotchy interior of the top-right dark mass

STRONGEST Dry-brush spatter trails below the crescent

FLAWS

## 5 distinct places, 2 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, 17 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. A major flaw holds Material and surface at rung 1.

GEOMETRY

## Measured from the 16-bit master.

The previous engine (V22) measured this sheet's master file: 3 principal ink masses traced (cyan), 8 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 16 edge segments, 31% crisp, 56% soft or bloomed, 13% broken.

RULE 1 Two tonal steps or fewer

Tonal depth held at rung 1. 5 steps: not applied

RULE 2 A major flaw

Material held at rung 1. Mild waves in the unmounted paper are never a flaw. 5 major flaws: applied

RULE 3 Any quality below 0.5

The rating cannot exceed 4. lowest 1.0

RULE 4 At least two valid reads

A read that breaks the reply format is discarded. 5 of 5 valid

THE ARITHMETIC

## V23 rating 5.0.

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.

MEAN RUNG 1.80 (2.0 + 2.0 + 2.0 + 2.0 + 1.0) ÷ 5
→

RAW 4.60 1 + 2 × 1.80
→

RATING 5.0 5 + 2.086 × (4.60 − 4.60)

## Where next

[Every record the full archive](https://peteryuill.art/archive)[2026.03.22 every painting from this date](https://peteryuill.art/days/2026-03-22)
