Contemporary editorial illustration painted in gouache, large white forms laid in with a heavily loaded brush on near-black with a thin red line, the brush loading left plainly visible inside every form as chalky streaks and drier patches with the stroke direction raking across each shape. Long-necked birds knotted together, abstracted almost past recognition so that a neck becomes a coiling ribbon, a wing a broad scroll and a body a plain loop, the frame reading as a field of interlocking curves first and as creatures second, filling most of the picture. A fine dark line is drawn over the white for the eyes, the beaks, the feet and a few feather marks. A scatter of pale stars sits as the single high-chroma element in the picture. Four layers back to front: the flat tinted ground, one broad pale mass of overlapping forms behind, the foremost forms in loaded white, then a fine top pass of drawn line and small marks. Calm, buoyant and unhurried.