A near-frontal ink portrait of a woman, the face tilted very slightly upward, the eyes alert and looking directly out with an expression of focused attention. The ink here is lighter and more searching than much of the sketchbook sequence — a finer line, the marks placed with more tentativeness, the hair described with quick parallel strokes that suggest its direction without fixing it.
The ear at the right is drawn with Cothran's characteristic structural specificity — the helix and the inner forms correctly placed, the cartilage indicated. The hair above and around the face is built from many short diagonal strokes, the whole mass having a slightly diagrammatic quality, each section separately observed.
The face's particular quality is the alignment of the eyes: set wide and level, looking directly forward but with the head's slight upward tilt giving the gaze a quality of expectancy rather than confrontation. A face in the moment just before something happens, the eyes open and waiting.
Among the ink portraits, this one sits near the middle of the sequence's range — not the spare minimalism of the cleanest profiles, not the dense expressionism of the most worked faces, but a fully drawn head with all its parts in confident relationship.