Mule

On the card

Small tools gather into a dependable working animal.

How it was drawn

Generated with codex exec -m gpt-6-luna (image generation), then passed through the plate pipeline: art-direction.md: flatten on white, grayscale, luminance to alpha (rgb = L, alpha = 255 - L) with Sharp.

A single patient pack mule built from small wooden and brass machine parts, gears at its joints, carrying neatly strapped bundles of tools on its back, standing in three-quarter view. Hand-drawn field-journal sketch in loose graphite pencil, monochrome grey, confident gestural lines, quick cross-hatching and scribbled shading, unfinished edges fading out. 19th-century naturalist's working notebook, documentary object study, no color rendering. One single subject, centered, filling a tall portrait frame (about 3:4) with generous white margin. Pure flat white background, no paper texture, border, frame, vignette, labels, lettering, or text.