A left-profile pencil portrait of a woman — the most technically elaborate pencil portrait in the new portfolio, with sustained cross-hatching that builds tonal zones across the hair and face. The hair is drawn in an upswept pompadour style, rising from a near-left-facing profile and swooping upward and to the right in multiple arcs; the cross-hatching within the hair mass — multiple diagonal passes in two directions creating a mesh — gives the upswept volume a tonal density that reads as shadow and depth within the hair structure. The face below the hair is drawn with the same observational care: the eye with its lashes, the nose in profile, the lips, the chin, the neck.
The cross-hatch technique applied to the hair is unlike anything else in the pencil portrait series — most pencil portraits in the new portfolio use contour lines to describe hair direction without building tonal mass. Here the cross-hatching converts the hair from outline to substance, the pencil building the pompadour as a three-dimensional form rather than a flat silhouette. The technique echoes the cross-hatching of the large pencil portraits (Works 1441 and 1445) but applied specifically to the hair rather than the face.
The pencil portrait series in the new portfolio has included some sustained tonal work (Works 1441 and 1445 were the most developed), but those were large-format 12.5 by 19 and 11 by 13 works. This 8.75 by 11.5 portrait achieves comparable tonal development in a significantly smaller format, the cross-hatching necessarily finer and more precise. Among the small-format portraits in this batch (the 8.25 by 11 ink series), this pencil work stands apart in its tonal ambition.