A study of color and texture.
01 — THE COLLECTION
Ten skull plates, ordered along one axis from near-stencil to full engraved noise. Ten colour tiers, ordered along the other from restraint to collapse. Every cell of that grid gets made. That is the whole collection — one hundred studies, and the structure is legible before you read a word about it.
The treatments come from COLOR HARDER, a browser instrument built for exactly this: a tiered randomizer that escalates from a house two-colour separation up through gradients, trapping, dither, plate separation and finally into total signal failure. Nothing is hand-picked per image. The tier is the recipe; the plate is the variable.
The interesting question was never which colours look good together. It was how far a drawing can be pushed before it stops being a drawing.
PLATE · TIER · STATE
Each piece is identified by its source plate in roman numerals and its tier number — PLATE I · T7. The two axes stay visually distinct so the grid position is always readable from the title alone.
All one hundred studies are 1/1s, released by zero-reserve auction. No editions, no tiered pricing, no reserve on any cell of the grid. Every study finds its own number, and the market decides which tiers it actually wants.
02 — THE INSTRUMENT
It can take more.
Every study in this collection was made with it, and it runs in your browser on anything you drop into it. Ten tiers, four modes — straight, duotone, tritone, cutout — with harmony and tonal-key controls, a film stage for contrast, posterize, grain and fade, boil animation, and exports up to 8192 on the long edge.
Two things make the grid possible. The state code saves an entire look — every tier, operator and colour — as a string you can paste back to restore it exactly. And the plate is upscaled before treatment, so bands and plates come out with clean edges instead of enlarged pixels.
FREE · NO SIGNUP · SINGLE PAGE · NOTHING LEAVES YOUR MACHINE
PLATE I IS ALREADY LOADED · TEN TIER BUTTONS, NOTHING ELSE · PRESS 1–0 OR TAP
03 — THE PLATES
All ten sources, ordered from near-stencil to full colour. The rest are chosen and waiting, one plate at a time.
Click a plate to see its ten studies and the notes on each one.
04 — TL;DR
One of the ten skull drawings. Ten skulls, ten plates.
COLOR HARDER. I built it. It takes an image and ruins it in ten steps, clean print to total collapse. Free, runs in your browser, and it is embedded above with the skull already loaded.
One piece. One skull, one treatment. 1/1 on Ethereum.
One plate at a time. Ten go up together, run, and settle before the next plate starts.
I do not know which ones people want. A price I set is just my opinion with a number on it.
Andrew. RIBT//LABS. I build browser tools and make work with them.
05 — PROCESS
A vintage anatomical engraving on aged toned paper. Toned grounds and varied cross-hatching matter — flat graphic sources only ever separate into four bands, while a good engraving reaches seven or eight. The tonal range of the source sets the ceiling for the whole row.
The plate goes into COLOR HARDER and every tier is run against it in order, T1 through T10. Palettes come from the harmony generator across the full HSL gamut. No cherry-picking a nicer palette for a favourite tier.
Each tier is re-rolled until it earns its place on the ladder, then locked. One study per cell. The state code is recorded so any study can be reproduced exactly.
Contact sheet, tier-by-tier notes, and what the plate revealed about the ladder. The notes are part of the work — they are where the study is actually visible.