T_282
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.05.07, day 130
- Size
- 97 × 180 cm
- Paper
- S12, Red Star Mo She Special Effect Xieyi, half-raw
- Inks
- MB4, MB5, MB6, MC
- 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
- Form
- 2
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 2
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 1
- Ink cover
- 72%
- Dark share
- 39%
- Tonal steps
- 4
- Flaws named by the reads
- bloom 5, other 10
Older engine
- V7
- 7
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: 0.045 (under 0.045 reads as flat).
Five reads, one answer.
Each quality placed on its ladder by each read, and the mean the engine keeps.
READ 1, IN ITS OWN WORDS
“A bold arc ends in a blunt dark slab over grey washes, with spatter in an open right half. The tone and layering work at a modest level. A cloudy bleed and creases mark the dark mass. An ordinary sheet overall.”
Main dark stroke curves fluently up the left edge but ends top-centre in a squared, bulky slab; lower grey wash is a broad filled block.
WEAKEST Blunt slab-like rectangular end of dark mass
STRONGEST Sweeping left arc following brush travel
Dark interior modulation 0.045, right at the flat threshold; stretched view shows striated arcs and density steps in the dark mass, but the grey block below is uniform.
WEAKEST Lower centre grey wash, flat inside
STRONGEST Brush striations through the dark arc
Pale grey sweeping arcs, a mid-grey block and the black stroke read as separate passes; the black largely covers what lies under it.
WEAKEST Dark slab mostly covers earlier grey passes
STRONGEST Grey arc bands under the dark stroke on the left
Strong diagonal arc drives the eye; pale arcs echo it at top right; the lower right is open paper with only dot spatter, so it feels thin.
WEAKEST Right half empty except scattered dots
STRONGEST Large arc sweeping from bottom left to top centre
Soft, milky grey cloud spreads beneath the dark block near centre; crease lines run through the dark interior; small white skip at centre.
WEAKEST Cloudy bleed below the dark block's lower edge
STRONGEST Feathered dry-brush edge on the lower left of the arc
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, 15 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: 1 principal ink mass traced (cyan), 6 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 15 edge segments, 13% crisp, 67% soft or bloomed, 20% 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.
2 major flaws: appliedThe rating cannot exceed 4.
lowest 1.0A read that breaks the reply format is discarded.
5 of 5 validV23 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.