T_338
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.06.03, day 157
- Size
- 180 × 97 cm
- Paper
- S12, Red Star Mo She Special Effect Xieyi, half-raw
- Inks
- MB4, MB5, MB6
- Phase
- P3 The Floor Rises
- Shown on the site
- yes (V23 rating of 5.0 or higher)
- Early storage triage
- SHP: save, has potential (Peter's early system, since retired)
Measured · V23 (v23.8)
- V23 rating
- 8.5
- Form
- 3
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 3
- Composition
- 3
- Material and surface
- 2.2
- Ink cover
- 74%
- Dark share
- 42%
- Tonal steps
- 6
- Flaws named by the reads
- other 10, water stain 2
Peter's own rating
- Rating
- 7
“There is always something that can be done better.”Peter Yuill · 2026.07.02
Older engine
- V10C
- 10
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.
6 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: 0.044 (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 strong R3-like sheet: two interlocking half-discs built from ordered translucent arc passes with fluent dry-brush ends. It is held back by flat black interiors in the cores and a few minor stray drops.”
Both half-discs are arcs that follow the brush's swing, with the bristle tracks visible at the ends. The notched inner joins are clean, and the dark cores are a little blocky.
WEAKEST Inner dark slabs read slightly filled-in
STRONGEST Lower dry-brush arc tracing the brush's rotation
The outer arcs step through about six grey plateaus. The interiors of the upper-left and lower-right dark cores are nearly uniform (modulation 0.044), apart from crease texture.
WEAKEST Flat black interiors of both dark cores
STRONGEST Stepped grey bands around the outer arcs
Several translucent arc passes stack outward from each core. Where they overlap the edges stay legible, so the order of the passes reads across both halves, much as in R3.
WEAKEST Dark cores cover the earlier passes beneath them
STRONGEST Translucent grey arc bands overlapping in sequence
Two half-discs meet along the white central seam to form a rotating S. The empty paper at the top right and bottom left is shaped as a counterweight, and the eye spirals down the tall sheet.
WEAKEST Pale upper-right field slightly empty
STRONGEST Interlocking S of two offset half-discs
Ink handling is controlled, and dry-brush grain is used at the arc ends. Small drops sit in the pale upper-right and lower-left paper, away from the masses. Crease texture shows in the darks.
WEAKEST Stray drops on the pale field, upper right
STRONGEST Dry-brush grain at the lower arc's end
3 distinct places, 0 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, 12 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.
Measured from the 16-bit master.
The previous engine (V22) measured this sheet's master file: 1 principal ink mass traced (cyan), 5 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 13 edge segments, 15% crisp, 62% soft or bloomed, 23% broken.
Tonal depth held at rung 1.
6 steps: not appliedMaterial held at rung 1. Mild waves in the unmounted paper are never a flaw.
none namedThe rating cannot exceed 4.
lowest 2.0A read that breaks the reply format is discarded.
5 of 5 validV23 rating 8.5.
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.