A frontal standing figure in black chalk on a white paper with a distinctly different surface texture from the earlier portfolio sheets — a canvas-like weave visible in the ground, the chalk catching the tooth of the texture, creating a slightly granular quality in the marks. The figure stands directly facing the viewer, the body rendered with more tonal development than any previous work in the black chalk group: broad shadow zones at the left shoulder and upper arm are built through heavy parallel hatching, the chest and torso receive interior marks at the breast forms and the abdominal shadow, and a dense hatched shadow runs along the figure's entire left side from armpit to ankle. And yet the face — like Work 1414 and the model of Work 1412 — is featureless. The head is clearly described: a rounded skull with a dark headband crossing the crown, the hair below indicated in several strokes, the neck above the shoulders. But the oval of the face is empty.
The textured paper is the most physically complex surface in the new portfolio, the chalk dragging differently across it than across the smooth sheets. This tactile quality, combined with the black chalk's weight, gives the drawing a more worked and substantial feeling — less sketch, more study. The tonal shadow on the left side is the most sustained tonal passage in the narrow-format portfolio, the hatching built in layers rather than applied in a single pass.
The headband recurs across the new portfolio as a hairline detail (1411's bob, 1420's headband), each time signaling a different model or a different pose of the same model. Here the headband is heavily drawn — a dark circular band crossing the top of the head — making it the figure's most visually emphatic feature in the absence of any face. In a drawing where the face is blank but every other zone of the body is carefully modeled, the headband becomes the figure's sole identifying mark, the one thing that distinguishes this skull from an abstract oval.
The featureless face in full frontality, established in Work 1414 and now returning here, is consolidating as a motif within the new portfolio. In 1414 it appeared in green chalk; here in black chalk with substantial tonal development it carries different weight — where 1414's blank face had a dreamy, botanical quality from the green chalk and the spare contour, 1418's blank face is more unsettling, the heavy shadow and substantial body making the absence more pronounced. The canvas texture adds a physical reality that sharpens the face's absence.