Transparent watercolor painted as a cutout illustration: layered wet washes with visible paper grain inside the painted shapes, selective colored-pencil edges firming the contours with dry-pencil breaks, pigment blooming softly where washes pool. Light passes through the washes like light through stained sugar, shadows staying translucent plum-gray rather than black, and the whole picture is drawn in watercolor and pencil alike. The painted shapes sit on a fully transparent background: real empty alpha around every shape, not white, not colored, no checkerboard pattern.
A small two-layer cream-frosted cake with a pale pistachio filling line at the cut rests in the lower half of a square 1:1 frame, seen straight-on at eye level, piped cream dollops running around its top rim like a row of ladder rungs. A soft white icing ghost with a rounded head, two stubby rounded arm stubs and tiny nub feet climbs down the cake's left side: one stub arm grips a piped dollop overhead like a ladder rung, the other reaches for the dollop below it, one nub foot braced on a lower dollop, its sheet-like body dipping and rippling with the climb. A thin icing drip stretches from the ghost's trailing edge back up to the top dollop. The cake's base rests on a soft semi-transparent contact shadow, darkest at contact, fading outward in the alpha channel.
Warm light falls from the upper left, leaving translucent honey tints on the cream frosting and a plum wash on the shaded side, with generous transparent margin around the whole subject and nothing touching or crossing the frame border. All surfaces are plain and unlettered: no piped writing on the cake, no candles, no topper, no marks or text anywhere.
