# Clay illustration system — first palette preview

Terracotta `#B64539` and Natural `#EAE1D9` are material anchors, with texture,
lighting, highlights and shadows retained. Charcoal `#22252E` and Natural form the
dark/light painted scenery grounds. A material is not a flat swatch: its lit and
shaded pixels vary around the anchor.

**For Brian’s review:** the existing olive foliage, screens and material accents
remain as secondary illustration colours for this first preview. Skin and hair
retain their natural colours. Partner logos retain their own identities.

## Formal marks versus illustrations

The supplied SVG logos and outlined lockups stay flat, keep their exact geometry,
and use only Terracotta, Charcoal or white. Use the white formal mark on dark
grounds. The website and outlined logo downloads share the same Nunito Bold wordmark.

Clay artwork, including the sculpted mi at the end of the hero animation, is an
illustration. It may retain surface grain, perspective, shading and a terracotta
material on dark scenery. Do not transfer those effects to formal SVG marks.
UI links/icons use the tested accent-text roles: white in dark mode and a darker
Terracotta in light mode. Core Terracotta display headings are a separate review
choice; see the contrast exception in the brand guidelines.

## Preserve when recolouring

- Keep subjects, faces, poses, object positions, framing, scale and silhouettes.
- Preserve alpha coverage and contact shadows. No halos or background matte.
- Recolour all nine animation poses consistently; keep the existing per-pose
  dimensions, shared floor and registration manifest. Do not auto-trim/re-fit.
- Match scenery’s painted wall/floor to its CSS ground and preserve the existing
  dissolves at the edges and theme transition.
- Keep editable originals and recoloured masters outside `public/`, in `artwork/`.
  Only optimized responsive WebPs belong in `public/images/`.

## Implementation and provenance

The September 2026 preview uses `scripts/recolor-clay.py` (Pillow and NumPy), a
repeatable colour remap with smooth material masks and explicit skin/hair
protection on the team. It never moves, resamples or changes alpha pixels.
Each responsive original is recoloured on its own original canvas. Native PNG
masters and a per-output alpha verification report are in `artwork/brand-palette/`.
Original native sources and published responsive inputs remain in `artwork/`.

A built-in imagegen trial was inspected and rejected: it changed 5,797 silhouette
pixels and surface texture. Brian approved deterministic recolouring instead.
The generated trial is reference evidence only and is not served on the website.