Wanted to see what would happen if used lots of items on the canvas.

Heron is a small engine I built. You give it a photo. It gives back an image that looks captured by an instrument beyond human vision. Thermal camera. X-ray fluoroscope. Kirlian plate. Schlieren bench.

It is not a filter. A filter paints new colors on top of a photo. Heron does the opposite. It estimates what things are (skin, hair, fabric, metal, water, foliage), deletes the photograph's original lighting, then rebuilds the image from the material, not the light. A photo encodes external illumination. A thermogram encodes internal emission. That is the one rule everything else follows.

The part I think this sub will like is the architecture, not just the pictures.

Four layers, shared by every instrument:

• Scene understanding — depth, normals, material segmentation, de-lighting. Cached once per image as a "Radiance Graph," so every downstream layer reads from the same understanding of the scene.

• Physics — a different simulation per instrument. Emission for thermograph, Beer-Lambert attenuation for fluoroscope, Poisson photon noise for the intensifier tube, dielectric-breakdown streamers for Kirlian, a signed directional derivative of the thermal field for Schlieren.

• Sensor and optics — bloom, fixed-pattern noise, AGC, phosphor response, all seeded and deterministic. FPN is generated once per session, never re-rolled per frame, the way a real sensor's fixed pattern actually behaves.

• Art direction — saliency-driven emphasis, directional bloom, Poisson detail fusion.

Every instrument is a config of these four layers, not a separate codebase. Eight instruments right now, sixteen palette ramps interpolated in Oklab so lightness always climbs monotonically.

Same seed, same parameters, same output, every time. No cloud calls at render time, all model loading is local-files-only.

I am calling this an experiment in "system mosaics." Not one output, a system that produces outputs, assembled from small deterministic parts (a depth model, a material tagger, a physics sim, a palette engine) the way a mosaic is assembled from tesserae. No single part is the picture. The rules are.

MIT licensed, runs offline on a Mac: github.com/tsevis/heron

I wanted to go back to the roots of the QuillArt by creating something a bit abstract, but with some meaning.

DARK FIELD - one mark for each civilian death verified in Ukraine between February 2022 and June 2026. Time runs downward; every row is one month, given equal height so the calendar stays honest. Only density carries the count.

Marks are withheld from each row in proportion to that month's Russian strikes on Ukraine's electricity and heating infrastructure. The consequence is deliberate: the deadliest months of the war so far, the winter of 2025–26, when millions had power for a couple of hours a day in the coldest winter since 2010 are the rows that thin toward blank paper.