Saturday, July 30, 2011

An unusually restful day in Honduras

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Cannonball tree
Watercolour and crayon
©2011 Charlene Brown

This is what you see if you look up through the lower branches of one of the huge Couroupita guianensis lining the roads at the Lancetilla Botanical Garden.
I had big painting plans for my Road Scholar Inter-generational trip to Honduras with my grandson… but we were kept so busy swimming in rivers, pools and the Caribbean, snorkeling on the reef, whitewater rafting on the Rio Humuya, hiking in the rain forest, planting coffee bushes, and watching our grandkids play soccer with the local kids, I didn’t actually complete anything!  Well I did mail two postcards to other Postcard From My Walk participants, but I’m only now completing the rest of my (barely) started cards, such as Cannonball tree, or turning them into full-size paintings.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

10 Painting things to take to Honduras

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Whitewater Rafting on the Urubamba, painted following a previous intergenerational expedition
Watercolour, crayon and ink
©2009 Charlene Brown

I'm setting out this evening with our 10-year-old grandson on a Road Scholar (used to be Elderhostel) intergenerational adventure, Exploring Honduras: Coral Reefs and Mayan Ruins. I've assembled what I hope will be the perfect array of art supplies for the trip. I’m hoping my grandson will paint too, and my list of things we’ll need is based on a couple of the blog posts I wrote two years ago when I took his older brother to Peru – 12 Painting things to take to Peru and 5 things I learned about painting in the Andes.

  1. coil bound watercolour sketch book with map and archaeology notes about the Mayan civilization
  2. watercolour postcards
  3. pencils, sharpener, and eraser
  4. crayons and Masquepen masking fluid to use as resists. The wax crayon resist stays in the picture, but I’ll take a piece of crepe to remove the Masqupen when the paintings are dry
  5. Koi watercolor pocket field sketch box, with waterbrush
  6. palette in a Ziploc bag – with a few favourites that are not included in Koi set – Perylene green, cobalt blue deep, Opera, metallic copper, and Quinacridone Gold.
  7. flat and round paint brushes in plastic holder
  8. glue stick .for collage
  9. Ziploc bags for ephemera – extra stuff and things not immediately suitable for collage. (Plasticized ice cream bar wrappers, for example, have great designs, but can only be glued after scanning and printing on more suitable paper)
  10. Camera with extra battery and charger. Apparently Honduras has the same wiring as North America, so this should be easier than previous battery charging efforts…

Monday, July 4, 2011

Mid-Year Review 2011

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Quebec City
       Watercolour and crayon
       ©2011 Charlene Brown
       Here are a couple of highlights concerning progress on The Plan for 2011:
        In the area of travel journaling, I’ve got a good start on a really big project I’ve been putting off since 2000  – an illustrated journal of our two-month Retirement Grand Tour of Europe on our way back to Canada from Dubai. I used several painted postcards I retrieved from people I’d sent them to at the time, and completed six new paintings for this journal, which was posted during the May-June period corresponding to the trip itself.
       I’ve participated in all six Virtual Paintouts so far this year (Boston, Romania, Cape Town, Japan, Côte d'Azur, and New Zealand, and am having a great time sending and receiving hand-painted postcards from round the world on A Postcard From My Walk.  I’m really pleased to be participating in the group blog – the quality and variety of the artwork is fascinating! Have a look
       I completed a project about poster production, Making Art with Impact, involving a combination of computer collage and lettering. I’m planning to do more of this ‘poster art’ involving background paintings of Canadian landscapes and cityscapes. This painting of Quebec City will be part of this plan.
       I’d also like to mention something not even in The Plan, that I learned quite accidentally, about observation skills, seeing relationships and relative positions and all that… I wrote about this in Seeing what you’re looking at  Although I can’t say I’ll always see what I’m looking at from now on, this was a big step in the right direction.