Uluru at last light, drawn not as a boulder in the desert but as a vast piece of continent abruptly refusing to stay underground.
Notes
It simply starts
This illustration is really about abruptness. Uluru is famous enough to arrive in your head prepackaged, but what interested me was how little warning it gives you: one enormous red mass starting out of flat scrub with no foothills, no buildup, and no visual courtesy of any kind.
The geology only makes it stranger. Uluru rises 1,142 feet above the plain and runs about 5.8 miles around, but the visible rock is just the exposed top of something much larger continuing underground for several kilometers. It is not a loose boulder dropped in the desert. It is the revealed edge of a vast tilted slab of arkose sandstone, pushed up, worn down, and left there looking unreasonable.
I have not been there, and I would rather say that plainly than fake first-hand awe. What pulled me in from photographs was the contrast between the ordinary country around it and the complete refusal of the rock to behave like anything nearby. The red is surface oxidation, essentially rust over grey stone, and the dark grooves are runoff channels that can turn briefly into waterfalls when the weather cooperates.
Seven flat colors, no gradients. Two reds carry the rock, a near-black handles the grooves, ochre and brown do the plain, and the sky gets three values because the sky was being difficult. The clouds took the longest. The rock is six big shapes and an attitude problem.
