Michigan's natural splendor is truly awe-inspiring, from the majestic meeting of the horizon and the water, to the vibrant pops of color found in the fields and the forests.

The lush landscape of the Great Lake state has captured the heart of one artist who finds herself being swept away by the beauty of nature with each stroke of her paintbrush.

Stefanie Mills now introduces us to Stephanie Schlatter.

- I think places are like people.

As someone who's traveled extensively abroad since I was able to afford my first plane ticket, I've resonated with places.

Some feel like home, and Northern Michigan is one of those places.

It just fits.

I feel like I'm somewhere when I'm up there, and I don't have to think about where I want to go, because I'm already there.

- [Stefanie] Stephanie Schlatter's studio is not in Northern Michigan, but once you step inside it, you quickly feel like you're there.

Familiar scenes like Sleeping Bear Dunes, Frankfurt, and Lake Michigan, they pop out at you right away as you take in her very unique works of art.

- There's a painting of Point Betsie behind you, but you can set 10 different artists up in front of Point Betsie, and they're each gonna have their own perspective, and all 10 paintings are gonna be unique, because you're looking at a blank canvas, that I'm the only person making something with it.

So it's a conversation between me and the canvas.

- [Stefanie] Now, while Stephanie has a studio, you won't actually find her there much.

Her craft, plein-air painting, takes her outside where she paints the landscape in front of her.

The definition of plein-air literally means to paint outside, now which of course is only a touch more difficult than just taking a photo of it on your phone.

(bright uplifting music) - Plein-air was developed by the Impressionists, because for the first time, artists had tube paint.

Now there's tube paints, and you can take those out into nature, and what artists found was that there's nothing like standing in nature.

Think of the last really beautiful place you were at.

Now imagine you get to stand there for two hours and interact with it through a canvas.

So it's really about the lifestyle, but it's also about that, as artists, our eyes develop before our skill does.

Plein-air painting helps your skill develop, because a photograph can never be what nature is.

Shadows are the most obvious example.

A shadow in a photograph looks black.

In nature, it is all kinds of shades of beautiful.

And you develop more as an artist doing that, so you have the advantage of it's a beautiful lifestyle, it's soul food, to be out there in nature, and it makes you a better painter.

- [Stefanie] While Stephanie works to capture the moments around her, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which can create its own set of limitations.

- In the creation of art, your eye always moves ahead of your skills.

So even people who are just art appreciators will find that their own eye develops.

The quality of art that they like and appreciate grows to be a higher quality.

So you're always chasing that.

And you're chasing nature, which can't really be beat.

So you see something that takes your breath away, and you're stuck with the burden of trying to make a 2D canvas as beautiful as what your experiencing.

- [Stefanie] As is evident in her art, Stephanie spends a lot of her time up north.

But as you can imagine, winter makes it challenging to paint outside.

Now, during our visit, she was working on this piece, a painting of a photo she took.

So she may not be up north in her happy place, but it's never far from her mind or her heart.

- Yeah, like it's pure joy.

I can't believe I get to do this, and at the same time, there are parts of it that are incredibly hard, and I think that's when you know you're doing what you're supposed to be doing, that the amount of difficult things that you have to do aren't insurmountable to you.

You don't think about them, per se, so much, because it's your calling.

- [Stefanie] Given Stephanie's meticulous attention to detail, and her creative eye, no painting is ever done until it's out the door.

Time and experience can not only change the scene, but the artists themselves.

- It's a big debate within the art community of when is a painting finished, and some people say it's not.

You just pause at interesting places.

And I tend to be in that camp, because as we're talking about the eye developing, if a painting comes back to me after two years, I'm not the same artist I was when I created it, so there is a temptation, and sometimes I give in to that temptation and change it up.