Studio log

Studio is the part of Brayer that has nothing to do with drawing. It is the record: how long you were at the bench, what you mixed, what you printed it on, and which gouge is due for a stone.

The Studio surface has five tabs: Sessions, Ink library, Paper library, Tools and Sharpening.

Sessions

A session is a block of time at the bench. Start one from the sidebar widget, or from the play button in any project's toolbar.

While it runs you get a live card: a timer, the task, and buttons for what happens next.

Control	What it does
Session type	Carving, Mixing, Proofing, Editioning, Cleanup, Other
Task	What you are actually doing. "Details layer". "Test proof run".
Projects	Attach as many projects as you touched. The session shows in each one's log.
+ Photo	Snap the block, the proof, the mess
+ Impression pulled	A running count
Notes	Ink behaviour, registration, what to try next
End session	Stops the timer and writes the summary

Beside the notes field is a dictate button. Tap it and talk. Inky hands do not type, and a note taken while the ink is still on the slab is worth three taken that evening.

Above the sessions list are this month's totals: hours at the bench, sessions, impressions pulled. Under it, "Where the time goes" breaks the hours down by session type.

The timer survives quitting the app, so a session left running through lunch is still running when you come back.

The per-project log

Open a project and go to Studio log in the project menu. You get only that project's sessions, notes and photos, in order.

That is the page to open six months later when you cannot remember whether you printed damp or dry.

The ink recipe library

Mixing a colour twice from memory is a fool's errand. Log it once.

Tap + New recipe. A recipe holds:

Field	What goes in it
Name	"Warm mix 03 — sunset"
Base type	Oil-based, Water-based, Hybrid
Components	Base inks and their ratios, for example Caligo Phthalo Green 4 : Opaque White 1
Modifiers	Extender, driers and the rest, as a percentage
Swatch colour	The hex, plus a photo of the actual swatch
Tags	Comma separated: reduction, warm, exhibition
Tested on paper	The sheet you proofed it on
Notes	How it rolled out, tack, drying time, what you would change
Project	The print it belongs to

The recipe list can be filtered to a project, sorted, and searched by name, ink or tag. "Near this colour" finds every recipe sitting close to the one you are looking at, which is how you discover you have mixed the same grey four times.

Recipes reach into other modules. Separate's colour sheet offers Match to my ink from this library. Editions records which recipes went into each impression.

Sharing a recipe

Open a recipe and tap Share as .relief-ink. That writes a small JSON file carrying the name, base type, components with their ratios, modifiers, swatch colour, tags, notes and the paper it was tested on. Send it the way you would hand over a swatch card. See Relief bundles.

Base inks

Under the library sits the base-ink browser: a seeded catalogue of ninety inks with brand, product line, pigment code, lightfastness, opacity and drying time. Search it by ink, brand or pigment. Add your own with "+ Add custom ink" when a tin you use is not there.

The paper library

Twenty papers ship seeded, with brand, fibre, weight, sizing and colour. Preloaded sheets are read-only reference; add your own with + Add paper.

Paper tests

A paper test is a small, structured proof record. Pick a paper, pick an ink recipe, and score three things out of five:

Score	1	5
Absorption	Sits on the surface	Drinks it in
Bleed	Crisp edges	Feathered
Tone shift	True to the swatch	Markedly different

Add notes (damp or dry, pressure, how many passes with the baren) and a photo of the test proof.

Tests filter by paper and by recipe. Pick two and tap Compare to put them side by side. That is how "Hosho × Phthalo green, Sep 05" becomes a decision instead of a memory.

Tools and sharpening

The Tools tab is the inventory: gouges, brayers, barens, presses, blocks and whatever else.

A tool carries brand, product line, model, category, condition (New, Good, Worn, Needs sharpening, Retired), price, where it came from, when you acquired it, notes and a photo. Gouges also carry a profile and a size in millimetres, for example a Pfeil 12/1 V-gouge at 1 mm.

Photographing the tools is not vanity. It is your proof for insurance.

Gouges feed two other places: Carve plan's gouge picks name the tools you actually own, and the Sharpening tab tracks them.

The sharpening schedule

Each gouge has a sharpening interval. The default is 30 days of active use; heavy carvers go shorter. The Sharpening tab lists what is overdue, what is due within a week, and when each tool was last done. Tap Sharpen and it resets the clock.

The tab carries a badge when something is overdue, so you find out before the cut tells you.

Not in this version

There is no camera capture inside the app: photos come from your Photos library or Files. Dictation uses the system speech recogniser and needs microphone and speech-recognition permission, both of which you can grant from the prompt or in Settings.