Virtual Paintout still in Utah

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Boarders and Skiers at the Park City Mountain Resort

watercolour and crayon

©2015 Charlene Brown

Here’s another entry in the September Virtual Paintout. For a change, I decided to use a view with lots of people… and I soon discovered there was hardly anyone out standing around on the days the Google camera Streetviewed Utah! I finally found a little crowd at the base of one of the lifts at the Park City Mountain Resort just outside Salt Lake City. Here is the link to it

I’ve used some of the tips on a 2008 post on the highly-regarded art blog Making a Mark

• look for connections between people in terms of relationships and body language
• identify the big shape that is the group of people. If you can't see an edge then don't draw it.
• make the connections between different zones more obvious. Overlap figures and objects to demonstrate who is in the foreground, the middle ground and background.
• Avoid drawing faces and feet. (If you draw a likeness, then you should really obtain a model release.) Squint when you look at faces and then only draw what you can see - which will be values. You'll be surprised at how little detail there is. (I should mention that with Google Streetview, likenesses are not a concern – all faces are pretty consistently blurred out.) Feet are often drawn bigger than they actually are. Try to make them smaller then you want to (again not a concern here, as everyone has boots on.)

Computer-generated Clean Energy Haiku

Peyto Lake


Here is what the three lines of haiku overlaid on the painting of Peyto Lake mean:

1. The production of cement is said to be responsible for some six percent of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Is there a way to have cement production absorb more carbon dioxide than it emits, acting as a vehicle for carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS
2. Environmental regulations may force development of new technology which will provide a competitive advantage by:

• reducing pollution
• improving  health
• overcoming problems inherent in the adaptation of green technology – problems such as:
• nuclear waste
• intermittent or bad timing of renewable (eg solar) input
• wind turbine noise pollution and higher costs

     3. Using the garbage: re-purposing, re-using or recycling (or the more recent up-cycling) materials which would be otherwise thrown out. ‘using’ garbage rather than just putting it somewhere is an environmental concept finally catching on across all sectors.

For the background illustrations (called haiga) to my computer-generated haiku, I have stylized some of my Canadian landscape paintings. 

On the road again

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Atacama desert

Watercolour and crayon

©2015 Charlene Brown

The Atacama Desert in Chile is another South American location on 'the road less traveled' that I read about in the Globe & Mail and posted paintings of on August 26 and September 2.

When I first found the images this painting is based on I thought the mountain was very much like a Chilean volcano (Osorno) that I computer-painted in 2003. But when I compared the finished painting of the volcano in the desert to Orsorno, I realized that, apart from a similar near-symmetry and being in the same country, the two have nothing in common. 

The Atacama desert is just over 100,000 sq. kilometers of virtually uninhabited, vegetation-free, stony terrain, salares (salt lakes), sand and felsic lava. The Puerto Varas region, on the other hand is a popular tourist destination, has a wonderful climate, Lianquihue – the second largest lake in Chile, other lakes which really are "the colour of the lakes in Banff National Park in Canada!" as our guide on a Holland America shore excursion had promised, and rose gardens as far as the eye can see. 

Virtual Paintout in Utah

(click on image to enlarge)

Mossy Cave Trailhead

Watercolour and crayon

©2015 Charlene Brown

The Virtual Paintout is in the state of Utah this month.  This painting shows one of the trailheads that line the roads that take you through Bryce Canyon National Park in the south-central part of the state. 

If you have a look at the link to this location in Streetview  you will notice you can’t actually see the water in the creek from the road – I’ll admit I added that detail after looking at the Google Earth view of this location. 

On the road less travelled again

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Colca Canyon

Watercolour and crayon

©2015 Charlene Brown

This canyon in southern Peru was also mentioned in the Globe & Mail article about lesser-known, but spectacular, sights in South America. 

More than twice as deep as the Grand Canyon in the United States, the canyon supports an impressive agricultural base laid out on hundreds of pre-Incan stepped terraces.

Colca Canyon reminded me of other paintings of the terraces found throughout this part of the Andes that I've written about – the Incan Salt Pans at Salineras de Maras  and the agricultural complex at Moray.