Usually the most difficult part of discerning shapes under the paint is separating the deliberate marks from the little channels in the parchment where the paint runs, often creating a letter-shaped dark spot.
But the A in S? AL is angular, almost like knife cuts or, as mentioned, modern block writing and parchment doesn't generally look that way.
I think maybe the "L" in S? AL didn't look like a U to me because the A and L are so angular and the upswing on the "U" looked like a channel-run but... it's so hard to tell that it's certainly possible it could be a "U".
About the cheese...
Ellie is very good at finding visual analogies (not just similarities in shape but in function as well), so I thought about the comparison for a moment after smiling over it, and it crossed my mind that if you were drawing a commercial mold cheese (e.g., bleu cheese), it would probably be mottled, but if a piece of cheese goes moldy on its own, it often looks like this with the mold growing like a little forest along one surface. Even then I'm thinking hmmmm, plant section?, but then I remembered there's one "plant" that looks quite a bit like a blue mushroom, a blue mushroom is a fungus, and so is mold. Who knows, it may not be as head-scratching as it seems at first thought.
But the A in S? AL is angular, almost like knife cuts or, as mentioned, modern block writing and parchment doesn't generally look that way.
I think maybe the "L" in S? AL didn't look like a U to me because the A and L are so angular and the upswing on the "U" looked like a channel-run but... it's so hard to tell that it's certainly possible it could be a "U".
About the cheese...
Ellie is very good at finding visual analogies (not just similarities in shape but in function as well), so I thought about the comparison for a moment after smiling over it, and it crossed my mind that if you were drawing a commercial mold cheese (e.g., bleu cheese), it would probably be mottled, but if a piece of cheese goes moldy on its own, it often looks like this with the mold growing like a little forest along one surface. Even then I'm thinking hmmmm, plant section?, but then I remembered there's one "plant" that looks quite a bit like a blue mushroom, a blue mushroom is a fungus, and so is mold. Who knows, it may not be as head-scratching as it seems at first thought.
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