I made artifacts/image.png: a 512 x 512 PNG of the IU_0223 cobalt cat bust in 16-bit pixel art. Pillow confirms the size and format and finds 11 colours. ffprobe isn't installed on this machine, so I couldn't run that check. I looked at the image once and adjusted it once; nobody else has reviewed it.

What's in the image:

• Grid: drawn on a 32 x 32 grid and scaled up with hard square pixels, so there's no anti-aliasing, gradient or blur.
• Character: one front-facing cat with cobalt (#6f7fe0) skin and black dot eyes, each with a one-pixel highlight. It has a pink nose and cheeks, a bone-coloured muzzle and whiskers.
• Beanie: brick red with tangerine ribbing and a gold pompom; the cat's ears poke out on each side.
• Armor: steel shoulder plates and chest plate with a gold emblem and a navy neck guard. The shoulders reach the bottom edge.
• Style: thick black outlines, a solid #0c1610 background with six small moss-green specks, and no text, frame or scenery. Apart from the background and the outline, every colour comes from the allowed palette.

What may fall short:

• The beanie hides part of the ears, and the face is fairly small.
• I had no images from the 787-piece set, so I couldn't check that it matches them.

I also added README.md, which records the size, format and these shortfalls, and tools/iu_0223_draw.py, which recreates the image. Both are staged but not committed, because git has no author name or email set here; I didn't set one for you. The image itself is left untracked, as the task requires.