A hand-painted watercolor picture-book illustration of a steep Mediterranean-style hill town running down to a small harbor, square 1:1, in the spirit of a classic seek-and-find book: seen from an extremely high and wide oblique angle so that the whole town fits in one picture, everything is tiny and there is an enormous amount to look at. The town is divided into clear districts by long stairways, terrace walls and a winding road. Top left: an orchard and vineyard terrace with a round stone tower, a small white chapel and a courtyard with washing lines. Top right: a school with a courtyard and a bell tower, a small hilltop park with a pavilion. Centre: a big market square on a wide stepped terrace with a fountain, many striped-awning market stalls (fruit, bread, flowers, pottery, cloth), cafe tables with parasols, and a church with a clock tower. Left and right of the square: terracotta-roofed houses packed up the hillside with flowerpot balconies, hanging laundry, green shutters, lemon trees, narrow lanes and steep stairs with people on them. Lower right: a bakery and a row of small shops. The lower third of the picture is the harbor: a stone quay, a promenade with trees, boat sheds, fishing boats and sailboats on blue water, a lighthouse on a small breakwater, nets and crates on the quay, strolling people and a seaside garden. About 180 minuscule painted people, each doing something: shoppers and stall keepers, cafe guests, children on the stairs, a baker, a priest at the church door, schoolchildren, people hanging laundry, painters at easels, sailors on the quay, strollers. A standing person is only about 3% of the picture height.
The look is the point: a real hand-painted watercolor picture-book illustration with fine dark-brown pen-and-ink outlines, transparent watercolor washes with soft wet-in-wet blooms, cold-press paper grain, and a warm sunny palette of terracotta, ochre, sage green, sky blue and rose. Every person and cat has clean ink outlines so it stays readable. Not a flat digital vector, not a 3D render, not a photograph. The picture fills the whole frame to all four edges: no paper border, no frame, no caption.
Exactly one small logo: a small dark navy hand-painted signboard above the door of the bakery in the lower right of the town, about 4% of the picture width, with a cream-coloured cat paw print whose big pad holds a swirling ocean wave, and the word "Shoji" in cream cursive brush lettering to its right. Apart from that board there are no letters, words, numbers or digits anywhere: no shop signs, no street names, no menus, no price tags, no banners, no boat names; the clock face has plain tick marks only.
THE ONLY ANIMALS IN THE WHOLE PICTURE ARE FOUR CATS, and there are never more than four. Not five, not a spare one, and no look-alike twin of any cat. No other animal at all: no dogs, donkeys, horses, goats, chickens, doves, gulls or any bird, no fish, no animal statues, signs, awning prints or weather vanes. No person wears an animal head, animal ears or costume. The four cats are tiny painted figures like the people, all in the upper and middle part of the picture: their feet are between about 15% and 60% of the picture height measured from the top, and NONE is in the lower third (the lower third is only harbor, quay, promenade, boats, lighthouse, trees and the seaside garden). Each cat is in the open, never hidden behind anything. The three real cats are each TINY: only about 0.7% of the picture height (about 14 pixels in a 2048-pixel-high picture), about a quarter of the height of a standing person, and wear a thin red collar with a tiny gold bell:
1. a black-and-white "hachiware" cat (black head and back, a white blaze splitting the face, white chest and paws) sitting upright on a stone step of a stairway beside a basket of bread, in the left half;
2. a brown mackerel tabby (warm brown fur with dark stripes, white muzzle and chest) sitting upright on a flat garden wall beside a row of flowerpots, left of centre;
3. a calico cat (white with orange and black patches) sitting upright under the red-and-white striped awning of a fruit stall in the market square among fruit crates, right of centre;
4. Shoji Cat, an upright standing orange tabby cat about three heads tall in a black leather jacket, denim shorts, cream sneakers and black wayfarer sunglasses with blue and red lenses, dancing with one arm raised in the crowd of the market square, in the middle of the picture, about one and a half times as tall as each of the other three cats.
No black or dark round objects, no piles of black cloth, and no dark animal-like shapes that could be mistaken for a cat. No watermark.