The ‘Starting Out’ Years is available now!

 My book on Instagram

The reason this picture has blue bars on the sides is that pictures on Instagram have to be square.  If you look at the page with all my Instagram posts, you may notice I didn’t figure that out right away.

The ‘Starting Out’ Years is the book I thought I was finished writing in December 2019.  But because most of the action in Chapter 5 takes place in 2020, a year which went off the rails, I had to rewrite that chapter several times.  I didn’t really finish the book until December 2020.

It's available at Amazon.ca and can also be purchased directly from the Friesen catalogue  (at a much lower price that doesn’t include shipping).

 

Another Instagram Adventure

Cobalt Lake
Watercolour
©2012 Charlene Brown

Here’s another one of my Instagram posts.  The theme this time was ‘Favourite tool’ which for me is a masking liquid applicator.  The painting shows the effect you get by using the applicator to draw the picture with masking fluid, painting over it, then removing the masking when the paint has dried. 

This lake in the Bugaboos is not cobalt blue, BTW.  It should be called Cerulean Lake.

I Read Canadian

Bookstore poster

 

I’ve been working with the BC team on a Canada-wide promotion of Canadian children’s and teen (young adult or YA) books.  The campaign started a few days ago with writers and illustrators uploading videos to bookstore websites’ Facebook and Instagram feeds, and continues with posters such as this on in-store displays of Canadian children’s and  YA books.

Have you seen these videos or posters?  Hope so.

 

Instagram adventures

Harbour Ferry Ballet
Watercolour and ink
©2010 Charlene Brown

I should start by admitting that I’ve only recently got Instagram on my phone.  Actually I only recently got a phone smart enough to know what to do with Instagram. 

And it turned out that I was not smart enough to know what to do with it.  

Fortunately, one of my granddaughters (not the one who explained Zoom to me a few months ago) didn’t seem to mind walking me through my first attempt.  Several times.  To get some practice in quite quickly, I signed up for a challenge that asked us to post 21 paintings in 21 days, each within a specific theme. This picture was my post for the theme ‘Lesson learned’ and what I learned with this picture was that if you’re painting en plein air and there are a lot of people around, very soon one or more of them will ask, “How much do you get for those?” and the only safe answer is that it’s not for sale. I explained this safe answer in my book, Plein air Painting: the drama.