Contemporary editorial illustration, art-directed and stylish, painted in gouache on toothed paper with a fine even grain across the whole frame. The picture is built from a handful of enormous flat shapes — the hair one solid mass, the garment another — each a single plane of colour meeting the next at a crisp clean edge, with a fine confident dark line drawn over the top doing the features and flicking single strands out of the edge of the hair. The skin is one unmodulated plane of flat non-naturalistic coral, the cheek and the brow and the jaw all carrying that same single tone straight across. Shoulders up, cropped at the chin. A tall woman with sloping shoulders, cupping a small bird in both hands, a solid russet mass of hair, a quilted jacket with patch pockets, a knotted scarf. Four layers back to front: flat lilac, held as one flat saturated plane and left completely plain, then tall stems crossing behind the subject, then the subject itself, then a fine top pass of grain and hard high-chroma geometric pattern worked into the garment. A limited palette of pale and decorative, each colour area carrying two or three tints of itself. Composed, stylish and faintly deadpan.