Contemporary editorial illustration under clear bright daylight, the whole picture high-key and light throughout, drawn in the register of a mid-century comic book with a firm dark brown brush contour around every shape that stays plainly visible against every fill, the contour varying in weight and thinning almost to a break where a shape catches the light, the fills flat and modelled from within by a light sprayed stipple that gathers where each form turns away and fades out across the rest of it, leaving the open ground clean. Shoulders up, cropped at the chin. Cow parsley and teasel in a tangle, set open and airy on long stems with the flat ground showing between them across at least a third of the picture, and a wren deep in the stems concealed among it so that it reads second. Four layers back to front: one flat bright cool plane, then a broad soft mass of mid-tone behind the arrangement, then the contoured shapes themselves, then a fine top pass of thin drawn detail. Three or four warm hues drawn from cobalt, cream and oxblood with coral as an accent, all of them inside a quarter of the colour wheel — coral, salmon, tan, ochre, cream — each plainly distinguishable from the others and set against that flat bright cool plane, with one or two small solid black wedges as the only dark in the frame. Still, watchful and slightly eerie.
