T_227
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.04.15, day 108
- Size
- 97 × 180 cm
- Paper
- S11, Red Star Mo She Special Effect Xieyi, 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
- Material and surface
- 1.4
- Ink cover
- 82%
- Dark share
- 20%
- Tonal steps
- 5
- Flaws named by the reads
- tide line 3, water stain 6, other 4, ring 1
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.
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: 0.047 (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 circular gesture sheet like R2. The lower dry-brush crescent is the best part. It is held back by solid black blots, cloudy tide-edged grey washes in the centre and crowded spatter.”
The lower curved sweep and the arcing grey strokes follow the travel of the brush; the top-centre black blob and right blot are bulky lobes.
WEAKEST Right-edge black blot, a shapeless dropped lobe
STRONGEST Lower centre sweeping crescent of dry-brush strokes
Five tonal steps and modulation of 0.047, just above flat. Arcs are banded and grainy; the right and top blots are dead black.
WEAKEST Right blot is flat solid black inside
STRONGEST Lower crescent with banded dry-brush grain
A pale grey arc pass, mid-grey rectangular washes and the dark sweeps can each be read, though the centre stacks get dense and cloudy.
WEAKEST Centre overlaps grow cloudy where the greys pile up
STRONGEST Pale left arc under the darker central sweep
The circular sweep sets up movement from the left arc into the lower crescent. Ink covers 82% of the sheet, so the paper is crowded and spatter clutters it.
WEAKEST Busy, crowded centre and spattered upper left
STRONGEST Large circular rotation sweeping across the sheet
Milky, cloudy grey wash patches with hard tide edges sit around the central dark masses. Scattered blotches and crease lines show in the colour view.
WEAKEST Cloudy grey washes with tide edges in the centre
STRONGEST Dry-brush grain in the lower sweep
3 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 3 distinct places, 14 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), 9 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 14 edge segments, 79% crisp, 14% soft or bloomed, 7% 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.
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.