Running out of masking fluid

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The Towers from Cautley Meadows

Watercolour, crayon and fluorescent marker

©2010 Charlene Brown

Here’s one last painting of Mt. Assiniboine Provincial Park, showing the view from Mt Cautley to the south at midday. The evening before I planned to do the painting, I masked the snow and the glacier lilies – fortuitously choosing to do the lacy upturned petals of the lilies first. The reason this was a lucky choice was that the Masquepen® (with its lovely needle-nose applicator) that I was using began to run dry well before I was finished.

Have a look at the picture of my masked drawing on the right to see how I got around the problem. The technique I had followed was to paint the shadows, including where they fell on snow, before any masking was done. Then I did the delicate masking (well, delicate for me anyway) of the flowers. There wasn’t a lot of fine-line masking left to do when I realized I wasn’t going to have enough of the green fluid to cover the remaining snow, so I ripped off bits of masking tape (the brownish stuff on the right) to cover the largest patches. After the paint was dry, I found that the crepe I use to remove masking fluid takes off masking tape easily too. Light green crayon was used to define the larches in the forest, and the back-lit flowers were finished with fluorescent marker.

Graphic Novel Artwork

Chapter 6

InDesign document, computer montage, characters by Philip Hogg

©2010 Charlene Brown

The background of this two-page spread from my graphic novel started out as a pretty complex Photoshop montage of Kyrgyz patterns and images of artefacts looted from the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. But, after shifting about 20 layers of loot, people, rugs, jewellery and dialogue around many times, I remembered that, as usual, less is more. This minimalist montage is the result.

I wish the extraneous bits I usually put in my watercolours could be taken out so easily.

Anyway, I’m happy to say this comic book is almost finished, and it now has a title! Counter-Espionage Disinformation for Beginners: the graphic novel. As soon as I’ve got a couple more pages at least in readable draft form, I’ll put it up on my website.

Virtual Paintout in Prince Edward Island

Cape Road

Watercolour, marker and crayon

©2010 Charlene Brown

The Virtual Paintout is back in Canada for the month of August! We have all of Prince Edward Island, the smallest of the ten provinces, in which to find something we’d like to paint.

While manoeuvring around on Google Streetview, I found myself wondering if the residents had maybe been warned the Google cameras would be coming by – a suspicious number of them seemed to have just mowed their lawns right to the street!

The Gulf of St. Lawrence, lined with miles of wide red sand beaches, can be seen in the distance in this view from Cape Road. Here is the link to this location.

Mt. Assiniboine reflections

The Lake with the Secret Name

Watercolour and crayon

©2010 Charlene Brown

I have painted the classic and much-photographed north face of Mt. Assiniboine, showing another unnamed lake – in this case a very well-known one. And here’s why this particular lake has never been named…

Actually, my theory is that it has in fact been named by everyone who has ever seen it! I think everyone has special memories associated with it, especially those who are lucky enough to come across it very early in the morning or late in the evening when everything is calm and the surrounding mountains are reflected perfectly. And these memories are of course secret.