2012 Year-end Review

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Balboa Park

Watercolour and crayon

©2012 Charlene Brown

Here's how I think I did with respect to following my plan for 2012:

As usual, I tried to paint more spontaneously and to move away from representational painting, and made some progress in stylizing landscapes by working on more than one picture at a time.  I’m quite happy with the way Balboa Park (based on photos I took during our Christmas trip to San Diego, California) turned out, and have another in the works, which I will post early in the New Year.

My favourite travel journaling was very close to home – the first six of these British Columbia posts.  

I’ve continued to participate in the Virtual Paintout, completing all 12 of the 2012 locations: Colorado, Elba, St. Petersburg, Gdansk, Jerusalem,Latvia, Thailand, Tasmania,Zealand, Croatia,New Brunswick, and Slovakia.

In May, I turned a couple of full sheet watercolours I painted about 15 years ago into same size (and much more striking) posters.

By far my biggest undertaking was to get a good start on a small book, Plein air Painting: the drama, a compilation of some of the stories I’ve written about painting en plein air over the four years I’ve been writing 1150 Words.

How to get everything you want into your picture

Christmas at the Cabin

Watercolour and crayon

©2012 Charlene Brown

This is the view from the loft in the cabin where we spent Christmas last year. Parts of it are quite realistic – for example, the Christmas tree really was two stories high.  The moose-like thing on the wall between the two upper windows actually looks more like a moosehead than the real thing.  The real thing is a large plush toy with velvet antlers.

And you can see the reflected tree lights and alpenglow on the Rockies... just not through that window from that particular angle.  I’ve invoked my (self-granted) right to use multiple viewpoints again, in order to include in the painting a few more of my favourite things about the cabin.

Virtual Paintout in Slovakia

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Lomnický štít

Watercolour

©2012 Charlene Brown

The Virtual Paintout is in Slovakia this month.  I've been to Slovakia, so I knew exactly what I wanted to paint for a change, and headed directly for the Lomnický štít and found this Google Streetview of it from Tatranská Lomnica in the High Tatras. 

I briefly considered another location (fun, but no mountains) in front of the L’Institut français de Slovaquie in Brataslava.  As you might have noticed, Napoleon himself provides a photo opportunity at this location for tourists.  Here he is with one.