Cut, Not Filled

Cut, Not Filled

Produce ONE image, 3:4 portrait: a copperplate-engraved poster of a place, printed in a single ink. Follow every line. Replace only the FIELDS block; everything after it is fixed.

First — do you have the fields?

If any field below still has braces around it, stop and ask. Put all the questions in one short message, and show the example under each one so they can see the shape of a useful answer. Wait for the replies, then draw. Never fill a brace yourself: a value you invented is a value nobody asked for, and it will look exactly as considered as the ones they did give you.

Ask in whatever language they are writing to you in. Translate the questions and the examples; do not make someone read English to tell you what they want.

The examples are only examples. If someone answers a question, use their answer; never fall back to the example because you prefer it.

If the fields are already filled in, ignore this and carry on.

Fields — replace these six lines only

• The place: {a city, campus, estate or quarter} e.g. Vibary — the library district
• What is in the scene: {four or five named things} e.g. a tall arched workshop, a footbridge over a canal, a stand of plane trees, a water tower, a row of terraced houses
• The reserved white: {which area stays bare paper, and its shape} e.g. the canal water left as bare paper, running from the lower left to the middle right
• The title, and how it is cut: {the word, reserved or hatched} e.g. VIBARY, reserved out of the hatching so the paper forms the letters
• The small lines: {coordinates, a year, a line of copy} e.g. 51.4545°N 2.5879°W · 2026 · a vibe library
• The ink: {one colour, on what paper} e.g. one indigo ink on warm bone paper

The plate law

An engraving has no greys in it. Every tone is line density — closer lines read darker, wider lines read lighter, and cross-hatching is reserved for the deepest shadow only.

Nothing on the page is a flat fill. Not the water, not the sky, not a colour block, and above all not the title. A reference run of this style cut the whole scene beautifully — stone, foliage, water, hills, all in true hatching — and then set its title as a solid slab of ink dropped over the top: the single mark on the page that had not been cut, and the one that gave the whole thing away.

So the title is done one of two ways, named in the field:

• Reserved — the letters are bare paper, left unhatched inside a worked area, so the type is a hole in the ink.
• Hatched — the letters are themselves engraved, at a line density different from whatever sits behind them.

Never a solid shape. The same applies to every other mark.

The reserved white

The lightest tone available is untouched paper, and it is a shape, not a margin.

One large area inside the picture stays completely bare, and it is shaped like something in the scene: the water, the sky, a road, a courtyard, a field of snow. It should be big enough to be a decision rather than a gap.

Without it the picture is worked from edge to edge and there is nowhere for the eye to rest — the failure that makes engraved posters read as busy rather than fine.

The scene

Scattered perspective, not a single vanishing point: the named things are threaded into one continuous view, near ones overlapping far ones, with the ground rising up the page rather than receding to a horizon.

• Heavy contour, roughly four times the weight of the interior line, around the main silhouettes only.
• Fine interior line for windows, tiles, foliage, water and stone.
• Layers overlap. Nothing floats free of what is behind it.
• Detailed, but not uniformly so — worked passages against quiet ones.

The type

• The title is the largest thing, and the scene breaks its edge: buildings, trees or hills overlapping the letters, so the type sits inside the picture rather than on it.
• The small lines are tiny, wide-tracked and set in the margins: coordinates, a year, one line of copy. Never centred under the title like a caption.

Ink and paper

One ink, one paper. Visible paper fibre and a faint plate impression near the edges. A little ink unevenness is welcome; smudging is not.

Never

• ✕ a flat filled area anywhere, the title included
• ✕ grey tone that is not made of lines
• ✕ a second ink colour
• ✕ a picture worked edge to edge with no bare paper inside it
• ✕ a single-point perspective, or buildings in a row along a base
• ✕ photographic or 3D rendering, or thick painterly texture

The result

A print somebody would frame: one ink, one plate, a place threaded together out of line, and a shape of bare paper running through it that does as much work as anything that was cut.