The brief was the biggest forest animal as a single icon, the gaur or Indian bison that still roams the central-Indian sal forests, and the only honest way to draw it is to let it dominate. So the bison fills nearly the whole frame, head lowered toward the viewer, the cobalt muzzle and the marigold-banded horns thrust forward. The directional dot-rows sweep across its body the way muscle and hide actually pull, so the mark itself gives the animal its weight without any shading. Around it we kept things deliberately sparse — a small tree, two birds, a winding serpent, a couple of flowering sprigs — so the near-black ground reads as deep forest and the bison has the room to loom. Big animal, small company, clean dark.