One more for the Bucket List

Ballooning over Bagan

Watercolour and crayon

Charlene Brown

As I mentioned in a post at the beginning of this month, I’m starting a ‘Bucket List’ PinterestBoard. Several of my Virtual Paintout paintings – of places I haven’t been to but would like to see – have found their way onto this board, and there will be paintings of photos, like this on in Myanmar, that I've come across on the internet – often on other people’s Pinterest Boards.

Apparently, this fantastic sunrise shot can only be obtained from a hot-air balloon and it seems to be impossible to take the picture without including all the other folks out in balloons doing the same thing.  I could have left them out of the painting, of course, but chose not to.  And I’ll probably include a sunrise hot air balloon ride in my itinerary when I eventually get to Bagan…  I’ve tried ballooning a couple of times, in Sedona, Arizona and the Masai Mara in Kenya, and it is truly an other-worldly experience. 

Update: There were several casualties, including at least four fatalities, and many of the temples, pavilions and pagodas were damaged in the earthquake that hit Bagan a week ago – a sad set-back in the on-going restoration of this UNESCO World Heritage site.

Even more haiku and haiga

Mt. Lefroy

Watercolour and Photoshop™

©2016 Charlene Brown

You might think, because I’ve used this particular verse before, that my haiku-generating computer has limited content to work with.  Not at all – so far I have input over 200 lines, with literally thousands of possible three-line combinations, and I find more material just about every time I read a newspaper or magazine or online article on environmental or economic aspects of clean energy technology development.

The thing is, I may compile samples of this clean energy haiku into a book, and I will only be using Canadian landscapes for the haiga illustrations. This particular haiga is a computer-stylized version of a painting I wrote about two years ago. 

More ‘found’ haiku and computer-stylized haiga

Whistler Village

Watercolour and computer

©2016 Charlene Brown

This is a continuation of a series I began a year ago, consisting of computer-generated haiku poems and haiga illustrations. 

The poems  (actually haiku-like non-sequiturs) have three lines, containing:

     . a clean energy-related concept (5 syllables)        

     . a tangentially related environmental or economic concept (7)

     . a transformation (5)

The haiga illustrations are computer-stylized versions of some of my Canadian landscape paintings.

I’ve set up a new PinterestBoard about Clean Energy Haiku. The pin descriptions aren’t filled in yet, but if you have a minute, check out this board anyway – I`ve added some clean energy haiku from THE ENTIRE IPCC REPORT IN 19 ILLUSTRATED HAIKU, by Anna Fahey, ©2013 Sightline Institute, Seattle; used with permission. Unlike my ‘found’ non-sequiturs, these are actual haiku verses!

Virtual Paintout still in Norway

The Bridge at Tromso

Watercolour and Photoshop™

Charlene Brown

Tromso is quite close to Bleiksv, one of the other locations I painted in Norway.  They’re only about 100 km apart, but between five and six hours driving time, depending on the ferry... not unlike getting from here in Victoria to Vancouver on the British Columbia mainland. Tromso is considered to be the northermost city (population over 50,000) in the world.

This Streetview of Tromso includes the Arctic Cathedral, which can be seen just to the right of the bridge.  It is called a cathedral just because it looks like it should be one, but is in reality a parish church. 

Virtual Paintout in Norway

Ringebu stave church, Oppland

Watercolour and crayon

Charlene Brown

Bleiksv, Nordland

Watercolour and crayon

Charlene Brown

The Virtual Paintoutis in Norway this month.  I’m putting both into one blogpost because I think they go together and could be considered a pair of paintings of Norway, even though the first one is in the mountains just north of Oslo, and the second is much further north (24 hours driving time, according to Google maps!) on the seacoast. 

I painted another location in Norway, but that picture is totally different from this ‘set’ and I’ll post it separately.

Summer Camp VI

Easter Island

Watercolour and ink + Photoshop™

@2016 Charlene Brown

During Week 6 of the Creative Content Camp we talked about writing series of blog posts or having regular (say, monthly) features, and then leveraging series and features by presenting them on more than one platform.

I have been writing series of blog posts for some time, and in Week 1 used these series to define Categories I then used in Week 5 to organize my Editorial Calendar. As I mentioned in my July 6 post, one of my Categories is ‘Real and imaginary travel painting adventures’ and most of my imaginary adventures will be the paintings I do for the VirtualPaintout.   Other locations I have painted without having been there include some I did for an ‘alphabet of art’ I wrote for the Khaleej Times children’s magazine when I lived in Dubai.  Some of these, such as Easter Island, will find their way into a new monthly feature, Bucket List.  I’m starting a new Pinterest Board for this feature as well. Several of my Virtual Paintout paintings – of places I haven’t been to but would like to see – will also appear on my Bucket List.