T_198
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.04.08, day 101
- Size
- 97 × 180 cm
- Paper
- S11, Red Star Mo She Special Effect Xieyi, 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
- 5.3
- Form
- 2
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 2
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 1.4
- Ink cover
- 57%
- Dark share
- 18%
- Tonal steps
- 4
- Flaws named by the reads
- other 10, bloom 3
Older engine
- V7
- 5
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.
4 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: 0.048 (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
“This is a gestural sheet like R2. It has a strong left column, a textured grey sweep in the centre, and lumpy dark blots. The empty paper at the lower right is unshaped. It is ordinary across all five ladders.”
Left dark column holds with a coherent tapering tail; the central grey sweep is textured but loose; the top-right dark mass and lower-centre blot are lumpy and blob-like.
WEAKEST Top-right dark blob, lumpy with hole, blob-like
STRONGEST Left vertical dark stroke with tapering drip trail
Central grey mass is richly grained with crinkle lines; left dark column shows some soft grading; dark modulation is 0.048, barely above flat; the top-right blob is mostly uniform.
WEAKEST Top-right dark blob fairly flat inside
STRONGEST Central grey sweep with streaked grain and ridges
Pale grey diagonal sweeps sit under the darker strokes and stay readable, with about two or three passes; the dark blots simply sit on top without building depth.
WEAKEST Dark blobs sit on top, little interplay
STRONGEST Grey diagonal washes crossing beneath left column
Ink mass rises from left to upper right with outward spatter, which gives the sheet direction; the lower right third is empty and unshaped, and the scattered blots weaken the focus.
WEAKEST Bottom-right empty paper is leftover
STRONGEST Diagonal sweep from left column to upper right
Dry-brush texture is used in the centre; paper creases cut through the grey mass; there is a bleached hole in the top-right blob; the spatter appears intended; no tide lines are visible.
WEAKEST Crinkle/crease lines through central grey mass
STRONGEST Dry-brush streaking in the central grey sweep
4 distinct places, 1 major.
Each read must name every flaw and where it is, in a ninth of the sheet. Here the reads named flaws in 4 distinct places, 13 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.
Measured from the 16-bit master.
The previous engine (V22) measured this sheet's master file: 2 principal ink masses traced (cyan), 5 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 15 edge segments, 53% crisp, 13% soft or bloomed, 33% broken.
Tonal depth held at rung 1.
4 steps: not appliedMaterial held at rung 1. Mild waves in the unmounted paper are never a flaw.
3 major flaws: appliedThe rating cannot exceed 4.
lowest 1.4A read that breaks the reply format is discarded.
5 of 5 validV23 rating 5.3.
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.