Nocturnal Artist's Workspace

Create one vertical 3:4 image: a top-down flat-lay of a desk at night where a loose watercolour portrait of the man in the attached photo has just been finished and is still wet. The sheet is cold-pressed paper taped to a wooden board with a short strip of masking tape at each corner; it fills most of the frame at a slight tilt. Around it the real desk: a glass jar of murky rinse water with a round brush lying across its mouth, a plastic palette with pools of mixed grey, ochre and dusty blue, a crumpled tissue stained with pigment, the edge of a closed laptop at the top. The painting is chest-up: he wears a dark hoodie with the hood down, laid in as a few broad wet washes; his head is turned three-quarter toward the viewer's left, chin a little down, eyes lowered toward something below the bottom edge of the paper, not toward the viewer, lips relaxed in a quiet half-smile, as if caught reading. Hair brushed back off the forehead and left a little loose. His exact facial features, proportions, eye shape and spacing, nose, lips, jaw, cheeks and skin tone are carried into the watercolour so he is instantly recognisable; only the rendering is loose, never a generic painted face. Washes bleed softly into the paper at the hair and the shoulders, a few thin ink lines mark the eyelids, nostrils and lip line, and two or three pastel blooms of blue and peach escape into the white margin. One warm desk lamp from the upper left lights everything: the wet patches on the cheek wash and the hoodie catch a soft glossy sheen, the tape and the jar throw small soft shadows across the paper, the laptop edge falls into shadow. Hands stay out of the painting. No real person in the frame. No text, logo or watermark anywhere.