Kathmandu
Watercolour and Photoshop™
Charlene Brown
A couple of paintings by our grandson, who
was six when they visited us in Dubai in February 1998, and a painting I did
in Alberta that summer will eventually make their way into that year’s Christmas
letter.
However, I couldn’t find any of the
paintings I did on a trip to Nepal in March 1998. So I painted this watercolour sketch. As you
may have guessed, it has been photoshopped within an inch of its life, mainly
using a process called posterization. This involves converting the original
continuous gradation of colour to eight distinct tones, with abrupt changes from
one to another. This served to give some solidity to the original overly-loose
painting, but lost the effect of the multi-coloured prayer flags, as well as local
and Tibetan textiles and costumes – and of
course the very colourful tourists, many of whom were decked out in florescent
finery suitable for the ascent of Everest. I also underlaid parts of it with some Devanagari script.
