T_213
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.04.12, day 105
- Size
- 97 × 180 cm
- Paper
- S12, Red Star Mo She Special Effect Xieyi, half-raw
- Inks
- MB4, MB5, MB6
- Phase
- P2 The Switch
- 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
- 2.2
- Material and surface
- 1.2
- Ink cover
- 83%
- Dark share
- 18%
- Tonal steps
- 5
- Flaws named by the reads
- water stain 4, other 6, bloom 5, tide line 1, ring 2
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.
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: 0.065 (under 0.045 reads as flat).
Five reads, agreeing on 3 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 arc-driven, mid-grey-heavy sheet, close to R2. The left arc has some real tonal life, but the black block is stiff and flat. Cloudy washes and blotched drop clusters crowd the paper and hurt the surface.”
Large arc of grey strokes sweeps left to right and holds; central black is a stiff block; drop clusters lower right are blobby.
WEAKEST Central black block, blunt slab-like rectangle
STRONGEST Left grey arc sweep following brush travel
Five tonal steps, mid-heavy; left arc shows drops, banding, granulation; central black mostly uniform with crease marks only; modulation 0.065.
WEAKEST Central black block fairly flat inside
STRONGEST Left arc with pooled drops and graded grey
Pale grey rectangular washes at upper left sit under the darker arc and stay readable; black block and drops sit atop, overlaps partly murky.
WEAKEST Black block covers rather than layers over greys
STRONGEST Pale translucent planes under the dark arc
Arc gives clear direction around a pale inner space; coverage 83% leaves little shaped paper; spatter scattered across top and right adds clutter.
WEAKEST Busy lower right drop cluster and spatter
STRONGEST Sweeping arc carrying eye left to right
Cloudy milky grey washes across lower centre and right, blotchy drop clusters bleeding into the arc, crease lines through the black block visible at viewing distance.
WEAKEST Cloudy pale grey washes with tide-like edges
STRONGEST Granulated pooled drops in left arc
6 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 6 distinct places, 18 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), 7 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 18 edge segments, 33% crisp, 33% soft or bloomed, 33% broken.
Tonal depth held at rung 1.
5 steps: not appliedMaterial held at rung 1. Mild waves in the unmounted paper are never a flaw.
2 major flaws: appliedThe rating cannot exceed 4.
lowest 1.2A 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.