Mount Rainier reduced to three colors, with the glaciers doing most of the talking.
Notes
Twenty-nine square miles of ice
Rainier does not scale down politely. Even from a distance it has the visual habits of something much closer, which is what happens when a 14,410-foot volcano rises about two and a half miles above the ridges around it and carries an absurd quantity of ice on its back.
The ice was the subject. Rainier has 26 named glaciers covering roughly 29 square miles, more ice than all the other Cascade volcanoes combined, and that mass is what gives the mountain its authority long before you start thinking about eruption history. The teal shape in this piece is not decorative. It is the mountain’s operating system.
The less cheerful fact is that Rainier is also one of the more dangerous volcanoes in the country, not because it is likely to drown everyone in lava, but because its glaciers and loose volcanic material can turn into lahars large enough to reach populated valleys downstream. Evacuation sirens exist for a reason. It is a deeply beautiful object with disaster infrastructure attached.
Three flat colors turned out to be enough. The pink sky arrived first and made itself unavoidable. After that the only real decision was where ice ended and dark rock began. That boundary is the whole drawing. Everything else is just me staying out of its way.
