Oftentimes, people ask me why and how I paint what I paint, but the story is often brief. This South Dakota painting is different. It’s sentimental to me and took me months to create. Its story is more complex, so I decided to share how it came to be.

Color Inspiration

Last year, I supported a Kickstarter called Toxic Art: Turning Pollution into Paint. Their goal was to turn iron oxide pollution from abandoned coal mines into artists’ paint. The Kickstarter was a success, and so as part of my rewards for supporting the project, last autumn they sent me a tube of paint they had made. They called it Reclaimed Earth Violet, and it’s a dull, purple-red.

So I had a fun, new tube of paint! What to create with it, though?

Image Source

When I look for inspiration for a new piece, I comb through photos—either ones I have taken myself or public domain/creative commons photos I find online. I started by looking through my personal collection. A photo I’d taken of the Badlands was perfect. It had plenty of interesting clouds, which I love to paint, and it had mountains with dull pink sediment layers, which I could capture with my new paint color.

• Source image
• Badlands of South Dakota painting

This photo is from last summer, when I visited West River with my host mom. In 2012-13 when I was in undergrad, I studied abroad for a year in Japan on scholarships; I did a home stay with her and her family. Six years later, she and I still video chat every week. She’s my Okaasan, which means “Mom” in Japanese. So when she flew to the U.S. to visit me and her other students, I wanted to show her what South Dakota had to offer.

And to me, South Dakota has always meant 360° horizon lines and the big blue sky like a massive bowl overhead. The clouds and the horizon feel like they’re within arm’s reach and farther away than the imagination all at the same time. It’s huge and humbling. The sky and the grasses here are a greater expanse than any flat canvas can ever convey. I wanted to show her that magic, far away from people. Plus Okaasan wanted to see the stars and the Milky Way.

So she, my dad, and I camped out in the Badlands, with its minimal light pollution, unique views , and nearby native prairie grasses. We took as many photos as we could, the source image included. As you can imagine, that makes this painting one of my more sentimental ones.

Painting Process

So that was paint color and image decided. Time to paint.

Quite a few hours went into this piece—somewhere around 30 hours. A significant amount of that was spent on new techniques. I’ve been practicing working with transparent layering and toned grounds, which means my base color on the canvas isn’t white, but some other color. This canvas was double-toned, with a layer of blue-gray followed by a wash of reddish brown. This resulted in the overall hue of the painting becoming redder than the source photo, which I like better.

The clouds went pretty quick, because I paint them so often. Layers of thin white paint over the blue sky, and voila. Beautiful clouds!

Most of the time I spent on this piece, I actually spent on the mountains. I treated them like folds of fabric first, capturing the light and shadow of the ridges. The distant mountains were tricky—and tiny. I needed close to 10 hours and my smallest brush for all the “folds.” Then with a thin glaze, I added the pink striations of sediment layers in the Reclaimed Earth Violet. The thin layering was a frustration but well worth it.

“Badlands of South Dakota” is a piece I’m proud of, and one I hope you enjoy as much as I enjoyed creating it.