My sister looks slightly past the viewer, the way children do when they have just been told to hold still. Oil at twelve by sixteen inches. I gave her a crown of daisies, roses, tulips, and one sunflower, painted the ground as a warm slide from yellow into pink, and let a yellow butterfly settle at the left edge and a blue one glow at her shoulder. The Vietnamese title, Hoa Cài Tóc Em, means a flower set in the hair of someone younger, and it is a phrase you would only use for a person you feel protective of. Six stages took her from a cool grey block-in to this. The flowers went on last, once I was sure the face could carry them.