Watercolour and crayon
Charlene Brown
After returning from
Whistler last week, we headed up-island for the Canada Day weekend and I was
AFK for the second live Q&A session of Creative Content Camp, but did get a
start on CCC Challenge 2 (Brainstorming image ideas for the next six months,
based on planned events, travel etc. – keeping in mind how they will fit into
the categories defined in Challenge 1) and downloaded Lesson 3 only one day
behind schedule.
One of the categories
I defined in Challenge 1 was ‘Real and imaginary travel painting adventures’
and one of the image ideas I thought of in Challenge 2 was the locations I will
find in the Virtual Paintout each month. Full disclosure: this is not a ‘new’ idea – I
have participated in almost 100 of these paintouts. The idea of writing a book
in which the virtual adventures are combined with real ones is new. Trust me,
finding a virtual location to paint on Google Streetview is sometimes quite an
adventure. The Virtual Paintout is in Cambodia this month. Here
is a link to the Google Streetview I painted. (This one was actually pretty easy to find.)
CCC Challenge 3 is to
develop 10 ideas for stories about our studios, and publish one of them. My story is about my one-colour studio...
I do not in fact have
a painting studio at home. I can prepare paper and draw and mask pictures, but
almost all my painting is done at a seniors centre where there is a huge studio
with a tile floor and big windows opening onto a patio, flower garden and
forest. A family of fallow deer are frequent visitors, but this is a bad thing. In fact here in Victoria, grazing deer are
considered to be a threat to civilization as we know it, but I digress...
At home, the only
surfaces in rooms suitable for painting are the kitchen table and the counter
in the guest bathroom. Both these have just enough room for my painting board
and one small saucer, and I like to work with a palette that is almost as big as
a half-sheet painting. I do have a
couple of tiny little palettes with carefully rationed portions of maybe eight
colours, but these are saved for painting hikes and other transportation
challenges. So I’m stuck with one saucer
with one colour squeezed out on it.
Oddly enough, this is
not a bad thing. I find that one colour
is exactly what many paintings (Angkor Wat, for example) need when I get them
home and look at them with ‘fresh eyes.’
And the one colour is usually purple.
