When I got the brief, to paint the surface of Pluto, I started by reading the data that has been gathered on Pluto so far. This gave me an idea:
The surface consists of methane, verified by spectroscopic analysis, which must be solid, because the temperature is nearly absolute zero on the surface of Pluto. But this methane ice reflected less light back than expected, based on the dimensions of that planet and alternative methods of analysis.
This meant that there was a contradiction between the results of albedo and spectral analysis.
Nobody has come up with a proven scientific explanation for this. At the moment, the accepted theory is that there must be dark stones which absorb light.

I theorised that Pluto must have been hit by as many meteorites as the other planets in the solar system and as the surface consists of ice, I became sure that those collisions must have marked the surface in another way than the craters visible on our moon for example.
When a meteorite hits methane ice, the energy of the collision heats the ice instantly to gas, which is then frozen in flight, because of the extremely low temperature on Pluto. As the meteorite loses its energy in the ice slowly, it does not form a crater, as it would on our moon, but it makes a deep hole, which is very black and of course doesn't reflect any spectral line.
I was fascinated by this idea and saw the chance to paint a really beautiful picture and not the expected one (showing a sort of Greenland at night: white below black, with white dots).

Today nobody can dispute the truth of this idea, because in 1996 the spaceprobe Galileo sent pictures from Jupiter's moon Ganymede, which is covered in ice too. The picture below shows what I painted, from another angle. If you can't make out the fine bows of ice at the visible collar of ice around the hole, which I painted, you need to take into account the tide friction of nearby Jupiter, which destroys such a filigree. This tide friction might be the reason for the furrows on Ganymede too.
Finally my idea might explain why the dark zones on Pluto, visible in newer pictures, are darker in the middle. If they are holes, you are looking into them vertically.