A Little Piece of Home: Creating My Greene County, Iowa Landmark Drawing

Some ideas show up with plenty of warning.

This was not one of them.

A few days before the Red Barn craft show in Greene County, I started thinking about what I could make that would actually mean something to the people coming through the doors.

I had plenty of farm photography. I had wood art, prints, pillows and all the other things I’d been working on.

But I kept coming back to one thought:

What if I drew Greene County?

Not a map. Not a perfectly accurate streets-and-roads kind of drawing.

More like a collection of the places people recognize immediately — the things that make someone stop and say, “Oh, I know exactly where that is.”

And because Greene County is where so many of my own farm memories started, it felt personal almost immediately.

Starting with the places that feel familiar

I started making a mental list.

The Bell Tower.

The courthouse.

Water towers from the surrounding towns.

The Raccoon River Valley Trail bridge.

The grain elevator.

Spring Lake.

A little bit of farm life.

The challenge was figuring out how to bring all of those things together without making it look like a map — or like a random pile of buildings.

I wanted it to feel like a memory of Greene County rather than a diagram of it.

So I started playing with scale, placement and composition. I moved things around. I made some landmarks larger and others smaller. I tucked some elements behind others. I simplified things that would have been too detailed to draw at a small scale.

There was a lot of trial and error before I ever put colored pencil to the final piece.

Drawing home

Once I had the basic composition figured out, I started drawing.

And somewhere in that process, it stopped feeling like just another project for a craft show.

I grew up around these kinds of places.

Small towns.

Water towers in the distance.

Grain elevators.

County roads.

Farm fields.

The landmarks you barely notice when you see them every day — until you move away, come back, and suddenly they mean something completely different.

That’s really what I wanted this piece to capture.

Not just what Greene County looks like, but what it feels like to know those places.

The part I didn’t expect

I finished the drawing just in time for the Red Barn show.

Honestly, I wasn’t sure how people would react.

That’s one of the strange things about making something personal: you can love it and still have absolutely no idea whether anyone else will care.

But people did.

They stopped.

They pointed out towns.

They recognized landmarks.

They told stories.

And by the end of the show, around ten Greene County pieces had gone home with people in different formats.

That meant a lot more to me than just making sales.

I had created something from a place that means something to me, and other people saw their own memories in it too.

That is exactly the kind of thing I want Buddy Seat Co to be about.

The beginning of Hometown Iowa

The Greene County drawing also gave me another idea.

Why stop there?

There are so many Iowa towns and counties with their own landmarks, water towers, old buildings, parks, bridges and little details that mean absolutely nothing to most people — and everything to the people who grew up there.

So Greene County is becoming the first piece in a new collection I’m calling Hometown Iowa.

The goal is simple: create original artwork that celebrates the places people are proud to call home.

Some pieces will focus on counties. Others may center around a town or a specific place.

But all of them will have the same idea behind them:

There’s something special about seeing home in a piece of art.

Available in a few different ways

As I’ve been figuring out how I want to offer this artwork, I’ve also been testing different formats.

The Greene County piece is currently available as matted prints and handmade wood art, with additional display options in the works.

One of the things I love about having my own printer now is that I can make more of these pieces myself — from the original drawing all the way through printing, mounting, framing and finishing.

That gives me a lot more freedom to experiment with sizes and formats that make the artwork easy to display, gift and ship.

And I’m still figuring out exactly what those final options will look like.

Which, if you’ve been following Buddy Seat Co for very long, probably doesn’t surprise you.

More hometowns are coming

Greene County was the first.

It will not be the last.

I already have a growing list of Iowa towns and counties I want to draw next, and I’m excited to see where this collection goes.

For now, I’m just grateful that an idea I had at the last minute turned into something people connected with.

— Brian