Virtual Paintout in Fairbanks, Alaska and points north

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Koyukuk River crossing

Watercolour, crayon and CP

©2011 Charlene Brown

The Virtual Paintout is in Fairbanks, Alaska and points north this month. I spotted this mountain in Google Streetview from a spot on the Dalton Highway (North Slope Haul Road) northwest of Fairbanks, then switched to Google Map view to find some water for the foreground.  Just north of the Koyukuk River crossing looked like a pretty good bet… and it was! Here’s a link to it.

Keeping up with the kids

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Archaeological site at Copan, Honduras

Watercolour and crayon

©2011 Charlene Brown

The setting of Copan reminded me a little of Tehuacalco, a place I wrote about in A surprise near Acapulco   last year. Copan is far more extensive, with way more structures and stelae and huge, epiphyte-laden trees, whereas Tehuacalco was more spread out and less jungle-like. And it seemed easier to climb…  Of course, that may have been because at Tehuacalco we weren’t all trying to keep up with our grandkids!

Construction at Copan began in the 3^rd century C.E. (page 5 in Timeline - History of Design) and the corbelled arch, temple, hieroglyphic stairway, and ball court shown here were built in the 7^th and 8^th centuries. BTW, the hieroglyphic stairway is currently under a protective tarpaulin, making it tricky, but not impossible, to paint – it is pretty much impossible to photograph!

Hand-painted postcards from round the World

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Comox Glacier

Watercolour postcard

©2011 Charlene Brown

This is the postcard I sent to Alison Staite in London – my June contribution to A Postcard from my Walk. There’s a new post every couple of days on this blog, and the quality and variety of the artwork is fascinating! Have a look…
There’s still no sign of the postcards I sent from Honduras last month, but I am absolutely thrilled with the July postcard I received from Desiree in the United States – I talked about it here.

Day 2 on the reef, and a spectacularly paintable discovery

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Pico Bonito, as seen from the island of Utila

Watercolour, watercolour pencils and crayons

©2011 Charlene Brown

The Mesoamerican Barrier Reef extends from the northern tip of the Yucatan peninsula along the Mayan Riviera, past Belize and Guatemala to the Bay Islands of Honduras, Utila is the smallest of these islands.

The first painting I started on Utila focused entirely on what I could see of the coral beds looking down into the shallow water close to the shore (augmented by what I could remember of the underwater view I’d had during an inept couple of minutes of snorkeling.)

It wasn’t until the second morning we were on Utila that I discovered this stunning view looking back toward the Nombre de Dios (Name of God) mountains on the mainland of Honduras. They get a fair bit of rain on the mainland, so none of this was visible when we first arrived. Pico Bonito, on the right, is the tallest peak in this part of the range.

Coffee day on a Road Scholar inter-generational adventure

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A different sort of coffee truck

Watercolour and crayon

©2011 Charlene Brown

We’ve all heard great things about shade-grown coffee – well, here’s another one. If you’re going mountain climbing on a coffee plantation, a shady one can be wonderfully cool on a hot July day in Honduras! I should mention we didn’t actually climb up the mountain, but were taken up in the truck you see here (first coffee truck we’d ever seen with seating for 25). At the top the kids planted a couple of dozen coffee bushes, sort of ably-assisted by all of us grandparents – it couldn’t have taken us more than 10 times as long as the regular workers…  Then we climbed down 1143 steps carved into the steep slope, through a jungle ravine past lush coffee and flower gardens to the processing area, where we had a picnic of hot tamales and coffee (what else?) beside this waterfall.