artifacts/ is gitignored and untracked, as required — nothing committed, no submodules.

Verdict: REJECT — IU_0025

Provenance. Downloaded to /tmp/candidate.png (2,643 bytes). sha256 is 02d9caa2…527d9f — matches the expected digest exactly. PNG, 512×512, 8-bit RGB.

Method. No Pillow in this environment, so I wrote a pure-zlib PNG decoder plus a region cropper in test/scratch/. That let me measure rather than eyeball the style rules, and view the head, face and torso at legible scale alongside the full image.

The craft is genuinely strong. The GCD of every colour run in both axes is exactly 16 — a true 32×32 grid, hard nearest-neighbour, no anti-aliasing. 8 colours, all in-palette, zero off-palette: #0c1610 31.5%, black 29.6%, navy 14.8%, lilac 13.1%, tangerine 6.1%, cobalt 2.3%, bone 2.0%, rust 0.6%. No text chunks and no glyphs in the grid. One centred bust, bottom row 100% non-background, thick outlines throughout. That's why style scores 9.

But the headgear is wrong. The tangerine crown sits at rows 2–5 (widest x10–x21, 12 px), a black hatband crosses row 6, then rows 7–8 flare to x8–x23 — 2 logical pixels wider per side than the crown — with a rust band at x17/x19. Crown + hatband + outward-flaring brim reads as a straw/sun hat. A beanie is brimless and hugs the skull. Frog, lilac and big eyes are clearly met; hoodie is weakly met (cobalt hood-rim curves and drawstring aglets, but no hood volume). One missing trait is a mandatory reject.

Scores: brief 4, silhouette 8, style 9, originality 6.

Where I could be wrong, stated plainly: the whole verdict rests on brim-vs-cuff. The flare is only 2 px per side, though that's ~33% wider than the crown and reinforced by a separate hatband. A lenient reviewer could call it an oversized beanie cuff on a wide-headed frog. The hoodie reading is also interpretive — if those cobalt curves are a jacket collar, a second trait fails too; I scored it present rather than double-penalise an ambiguity. Rule 7 cohesion is an impression only: no other units from the set were available to compare against.

Delivered (both untracked):

• artifacts/review.json — the required JSON, schema-validated: exact key set, name 11 chars / 2 words, reason 290 of 300 chars, all scores integers in 0–10.
• artifacts/README.md — the question, provenance, method, and the evidence separated into measured facts, inferences, uncertainty, and open questions for the style guide.