Newar painters in the Kathmandu Valley size cotton cloth with animal glue and kaolin, rule the construction with compass and straightedge, then paint it out solid in ground mineral — lapis, cinnabar, malachite, orpiment, gold. A mandala is not ornament here. It is a plan: nested rings inside a square palace with four cardinal gates.

This system takes that diagram literally. The page is the charnel ground, black with a blue cast. Every surface is a precinct with gated axes. Colour is mineral and opaque, edges are gold hairlines, and layout is built from the centre outward rather than from a left margin.