Render transparent watercolor through negative painting: build selected lighter forms by layering the surrounding wash shapes, leaving interlocking reserves and nested edges. Model interior detail sparingly in paint; do not turn the subject into a blank white cutout. Resemblance sits in big shapes: silhouette, pose, large reserved-form areas; below fingertip scale everything is nested wash edges and reserves. Eyes and nose, if present, are negative-painted shapes with one paint-made highlight. Texture is visible everywhere. No photographic patches, crisp strands or glossy eye reflections.
Square 1:1 frame, painted on opaque cream watercolor paper that fills the whole frame, the washes running to all four edges. A cross-section of a reed bed treatment pond: pale reed stems stand against a blue-grey sky in the upper third, below them a band of dark water, and below that a cutaway of the ground showing three layers, a gravel layer packed with white tangled reed roots, a coarser stone layer, and a dark buried drain pipe running across the bottom with one small outlet at the right edge where a thin stream falls into a ditch. The reeds and roots are the pale reserved shapes, sharpest at the centre.
Soft blue-grey and sage washes around the reeds, umber and grey for the gravel and stones, deep indigo for the water, and a bright reserve of paper white for the roots. The pipe and ditch carry no lettering.
