SKIA
SKIA (σκιά, "shadow") — a concept-art instrument for gestalt and notan, built for composing diptychs. Three values only: black, one adjustable gray, white. Big masses, no detail possible. The canvas is always two panels with a real gutter, and the composition that matters is the relationship between them.
Made in the spirit of Alchemy (http://al.chemy.org) — the shape-generation sketching tool remembered at last thanks to the notes on ComputerAssistedDrawing. What SKIA inherits from it: proposal over precision, quantity over preciousness, constraint as the instrument, no color ever.
What it does
- Mass brush, shapes, fill — white is a brush too: the cut.
- Echo — a stroke on one panel speaks on both: mirror (reflected across the gutter), antiphon (reflected and value-inverted — mass on one side, void on the other), unison.
- Propose — SKIA reads the panel, finds a quiet zone, and offers a mass that opposes it. Undo rejects.
- The Wall — eight seeded continuations of the current state shown as thumbnails; take one or let none in.
- Frame — resize and crop the whole diptych by eye, dragging edges and corners. A recorded, undoable move; marks keep their size.
- Gestalt checks — flip, invert, squint, swap; live B/G/W proportion bars under each panel.
- Two-thumb drawing — on a phone, both panels at once, one hand each.
- Scores, not bitmaps — every composition is a replayable JSON score, FAUX-style. Claude reads and writes the same scores: appended steps arrive as a banner with an animated replay.
- Exports — PNGs of the diptych and each panel; Metope-ready stamps (transparent ground, ink-darkness as press-height) for METOPE's Image→relief stamping; panels carry into DISEGNO as underlays.
Lives in TROY/SKIA (skia.html + skia-server.js, port 8781); served from the studio Mac, the iPad or phone as easel over the home network.