# Set 3 critique

Read by the orchestrating assistant (contact.png now includes 3-7).

- 3-1 (dark ground): the test did not happen. Hands keys the tone covering most of a target to paper, so the dark table came out white. A tool fact, not an artistic answer. Fixed with run.mjs --absolute (a white band added below while drawing, then cropped; vendored engine unchanged) and re-run as 3-7.
- 3-7 (dark ground, absolute): the field is dark; the cup's rim becomes the brightest shape, a light ring around a black; the apple is a lit crescent; both shadows sink into the field. The inside/outside rhyme survives in a new form: both objects are now lights in a dark, and the cup's light encloses its dark while the apple's light only edges its own. This is the first thumbnail that carries the prompt's chiaroscuro. Faults: the field is one uniform diagonal texture everywhere (it competes with the objects); a pale seam along the bottom edge where the white band met the image; the frame edges are lighter than the field.
- 3-2 (three-quarter view): the cup reads more as a cup, but its inside dark joins its shadow side and its cast shadow into one mass. Straight-down is not a gimmick: it is what lets the rim separate the inside dark from the outside dark.
- 3-3 (crop): the cup and its shadow become a large two-lobed dark with a thin light rim; the apple is a dark at the edge. Strong as a shape, but the two-object relation is gone.
- 3-4 (chain of four): more apples make a pattern of repeated dark ovals; the cup's difference is diluted. Fewer is stronger: one apple.
- 3-5 (restraint 0.8): almost identical to 2-1; this restraint range changes little here. Nothing learned about economy.
- 3-6 (Rembrandt pen): greyer and softer, and the relation still reads: it is in the arrangement, not only in the charcoal. Kollwitz stays, for the prompt's charcoal.

## Decision
Direction: seen from above, one cup, one apple, dark field (3-7).
Consequential question for a passage of work: how should the field be made (value, falloff, marks) so that the light ring reads as the cup holding the dark, not as a hole in the table, and so the field stops competing with the objects?
Tool: native drawing (it is a question of marks and tonal construction). Larger (1000 px).