1150 Words by Charlene Brown: August 2025

Sunday, August 24, 2025

One-off cards I’ve painted recently

Cascade Ponds at Banff

watercolour card

Spirit bear mother and cubs

watercolour card

Lakes above O’Hara

watercolour card 5” x 7”

Fall flowers in the Valley of the 10 Peaks

watercolour card 5" x 7"

As I mentioned in a blog post in May of last year, I have a large supply specially-cut pieces of heavy watercolour paper which can be folded into 5”x7” cards.

So, occasionally I paint greeting cards and sometimes I get prints of these cards made. But I prefer having cards made from larger paintings, which allows for more detail to be included.

Above are four examples of unique cards of which I won’t be getting prints made. Only one person will get each of these.

Sunday, August 17, 2025

Painting an Entire Canyon with telescoped perspective

Johnston Canyon, Banff National Park
crayon, watercolour, and ink
©2025 Charlene Brown

Recently, I tried an experiment using a Google map of a canyon about 20 km west of Banff, as well as several Google Streetviews* along the canyon. Each waterfall is placed with some accuracy but, as you might suspect, is much larger than it should be in a picture this size.

Originally, I considered including the Ink Pots, located about 3 km above Johnston Canyon, in the painting but soon realized that would be ridiculous. I painted the Ink Pots in 2018.

· * Yes, Johnston Canyon has in fact been streetviewed and many of the waterfalls have also been photographed using a Google 360 degree camera. The photograph on the right, by Greg Belluomini, with the location just near the Upper Falls indicated in the square insert in the lower left corner, was one of my reference photographs. You may recognize it in the painting above, about one third of the way down from the top of the picture. Or you may not – I barely recognized it myself.

Sunday, August 10, 2025

When we weren’t allowed to go to Alberta

Victoria Glacier from Mt. Fairview

watercolour and crayon

I’ve been thinking lately of that awful time in the first stages of the pandemic before any vaccines were developed and interprovincial travel was discouraged. My obligatory Alberta Rockies paintings at that time were often based on pictures sent to me by our Calgary daughter. She and her family, like many Albertans, found themselves exploring parts of their province even they had not been to before.

I put a small semi-abstract sketch of Victoria Glacier from Mt. Fairview in my 9 September 2020 blogpost using for reference a picture our daughter had taken of her daughter in July of that year. After I finished the painting above, re-using that picture as one of my references, it occurred to me I should have tried including our granddaughter…. It was too late to paint her so I Photoshopped her in. I’m not sure what she was pointing at in the original photo, but the way she was placed in my painting has her pointing at the Plain of Six Glaciers, a small green plateau which can be seen just below the right hand end of Victoria Glacier.

Sunday, August 3, 2025

We’ve lived here longer than anywhere

We picked Victoria for retirement in 2000, of all the places in Alberta and British Columbia that we had been considering.

Actually I think I was the only one considering Alberta, and I sometimes wonder if my husband decided on Victoria when he first came here to attend Royal Roads Military College in 1958.