What Makers Chose, and When: Noting the Quantities a Rule Leaves Open

Two makers turn words’ emotional values into shaded images of reliefs: tiles for an English story’s sentences, and portraits of six Japanese authors. One rule sets a height field’s fineness, depth and sharpness, leaving the lexicon, word choice, how values enter, seed, drawing and color to the makers. The article presents a note recording, for each quantity, whether it was set before or after seeing its output and which images used it. It recommends attaching the note and, before drawing, fixing how values enter and what to compare, then counting how much of the rule’s range the words or sentences span. The note shows the portraits’ percentiles, seeds and colors set after seeing sketches; no viewer study has tested it. This is the authors’ original manuscript (a Work Bench Article), submitted to Leonardo (MIT Press) on 31 October 2026. It has not been peer reviewed. Supplements S1 (extended text and tables) and S2 (images) are the versions submitted with it. The scripts, conditions and results (Supplement S3) are archived at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23814559. The use of generative AI is disclosed in S1 (S1.0).