Graphic Novel Artwork

Chapter 5

InDesign document, watercolour painting, characters by Philip Hogg

©2010 Charlene Brown

Except for the Epilogue – wherein everything falls into place back in Ottawa about a month after the action in Chapters 4, 5 and 6 – my graphic novel is now complete! It’s a little rough around the edges in places, but I’m hoping to have it ready to go to press in October. Meanwhile, I’ve put the 18 completed pages up on my website. You can find it by clicking on Counter-Espionage Disinformation for Beginners:…the graphic novel

If you want to have a look at it in this more readable format, please be sure to have your pdf reader set to display two pages at a time. And please feel free to advise me of all the typos, inconsistent spellings or other peculiarities you come across!

Running out of masking fluid

Click on image to enlarge

The Towers from Cautley Meadows

Watercolour, crayon and fluorescent marker

©2010 Charlene Brown

Here’s one last painting of Mt. Assiniboine Provincial Park, showing the view from Mt Cautley to the south at midday. The evening before I planned to do the painting, I masked the snow and the glacier lilies – fortuitously choosing to do the lacy upturned petals of the lilies first. The reason this was a lucky choice was that the Masquepen® (with its lovely needle-nose applicator) that I was using began to run dry well before I was finished.

Have a look at the picture of my masked drawing on the right to see how I got around the problem. The technique I had followed was to paint the shadows, including where they fell on snow, before any masking was done. Then I did the delicate masking (well, delicate for me anyway) of the flowers. There wasn’t a lot of fine-line masking left to do when I realized I wasn’t going to have enough of the green fluid to cover the remaining snow, so I ripped off bits of masking tape (the brownish stuff on the right) to cover the largest patches. After the paint was dry, I found that the crepe I use to remove masking fluid takes off masking tape easily too. Light green crayon was used to define the larches in the forest, and the back-lit flowers were finished with fluorescent marker.

Graphic Novel Artwork

Chapter 6

InDesign document, computer montage, characters by Philip Hogg

©2010 Charlene Brown

The background of this two-page spread from my graphic novel started out as a pretty complex Photoshop montage of Kyrgyz patterns and images of artefacts looted from the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. But, after shifting about 20 layers of loot, people, rugs, jewellery and dialogue around many times, I remembered that, as usual, less is more. This minimalist montage is the result.

I wish the extraneous bits I usually put in my watercolours could be taken out so easily.

Anyway, I’m happy to say this comic book is almost finished, and it now has a title! Counter-Espionage Disinformation for Beginners: the graphic novel. As soon as I’ve got a couple more pages at least in readable draft form, I’ll put it up on my website.

Virtual Paintout in Prince Edward Island

Cape Road

Watercolour, marker and crayon

©2010 Charlene Brown

The Virtual Paintout is back in Canada for the month of August! We have all of Prince Edward Island, the smallest of the ten provinces, in which to find something we’d like to paint.

While manoeuvring around on Google Streetview, I found myself wondering if the residents had maybe been warned the Google cameras would be coming by – a suspicious number of them seemed to have just mowed their lawns right to the street!

The Gulf of St. Lawrence, lined with miles of wide red sand beaches, can be seen in the distance in this view from Cape Road. Here is the link to this location.

Mt. Assiniboine reflections

The Lake with the Secret Name

Watercolour and crayon

©2010 Charlene Brown

I have painted the classic and much-photographed north face of Mt. Assiniboine, showing another unnamed lake – in this case a very well-known one. And here’s why this particular lake has never been named…

Actually, my theory is that it has in fact been named by everyone who has ever seen it! I think everyone has special memories associated with it, especially those who are lucky enough to come across it very early in the morning or late in the evening when everything is calm and the surrounding mountains are reflected perfectly. And these memories are of course secret.

Mount Assiniboine

From Cautley Meadow

Watercolour and crayon

©2010 Charlene Brown

Since horses are no longer allowed into this sensitive alpine region, there are only two ways into Mt. Assiniboine Provincial Park, 6-8 hours climbing/skiing or 10 minutes in a helicopter. I’ll admit right off that I took the 10-minute route (including a pretty exciting updraft-augmented leap through a dip in the precipitous ridge of the continental divide). But I did get myself and my watercolour sketching stuff up to the Cautley Meadow for this unusual view of Mt. Assiniboine – the frequently clouded east face. It’s pretty well impossible to do a painting with only one subject in magical places like this, so I’ve included the surrounding glaciers (Gloria on the far left, and Magog in front of Mt. Assiniboine) and lakes (Magog on the right, Gog and a tiny, unnamed pond we were not encouraged to explore because a grizzly sow is currently teaching her cubs to swim and fish there). I even tried to capture the effect of the carpets of spring flowers – mostly blue anemones, forget-me-nots, moss campion and heather, with glacier lilies near the timberline below us. BTW, I say spring flowers because summer at this elevation is said to begin August 1 and extend to August 15.

More Retreating Glaciers

Grinnell Glacier, Montana, U.S.A.

Watercolour sketch

©2010 Charlene Brown

On our recent drive to Calgary to hike in the Canadian Rockies, we took the American route across northern Washington, Idaho, and Montana, stopping overnight in Spokane and at Many Glaciers Lodge in Glacier National Park. The second day included the spectacular traverse of the almost 80-year-old, 48-mile Going to the Sun Road – that took four hours! Of the many wonderful painting locations along this road and the route in to the lodge, this lupin meadow on Sherburne Lake, with the Grinnell Glacier in the distance, was my favourite. There’s a fascinating collection of historic photographs at the lodge, showing the vastly greater volume of ice in the area in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and some of the most striking comparisons can be seen on the website of the Northern Rocky Mountains Science Center. The one closest to the location of this painting is Grinnell Glacier from Lake Josephine circa 1914 - 1938 - 2008 If you have a few minutes be sure to have a look at this impressive and beautifully designed website.

Mid-year review

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Arrival at Lake Issyk-kul, Kyrgyzstan

Watercolour, background for Chapter 5 of graphic novel

©2010 Charlene Brown

Under cover of darkness, Lake Issyk-kul, back and front cover illustration

Photoshopped watercolour

©2010 Charlene Brown

I’m using Tina Mammoser’s January 2008 post on Achievements, Mind maps/Concept maps, Goal setting as a guideline to review progress on My Plan for 2010,

Achievements: In the first six months of 2010, I wrote 32 blog posts. However, if I only count posts where I really feel I’ve achieved something – by which I mean I’ve done something different – there are only six! BTW – I noticed this reflects the Pareto Principle (roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes) as I only spent about 20% of my time on these projects.

Mind Map/ Concept Map: This is a great way to ‘diagram’ your plans! First you draw radial Mind Maps around your main areas of concentration (mine are landscape painting, graphic novel and archaeology) then connect various permutations and combinations of techniques, venues and target groups – all the usual blogging concepts – to generate and visualize ideas. Tina Mammoser’s June 29 post highlights a new, creative twist on mind mapping – the PIP Personal Idea Pad developed by Todd Henry, who writes the Accidental Creative. PIP broadens your horizons by adding multiple perspectives (and a unique framework to contain them) to maximize your chances of generating brilliant, often tangential, ideas.

Goal Setting: Do the goals I posted in My Plan for 2010 need to be adjusted?

· Paint more spontaneously: This remains elusive, but I will continue trying.

· Do more journaling: This is going well. Haven’t tried ‘blogging on the road’ yet, though I love it when other people, like Mary Paquet, do!

· Continue to participate in group blogs such as Virtual Paintout Plein Air Artists, and The Art of the Landscape.

· Write more ‘how-to’ articles for Empty Easel. I added The Extreme Sport of Watercolour Painting (which is not so much how-to as how-I-did-it).

· Finish graphic novel - learn how to use tablet: I added three 2-page spreads in the first half of the year, but as for learning to use the tablet… I’ve discovered outsourcing! The figures in my comic book are much better now that my grandson, Philip Hogg, is doing them. I did discover that sketching people in very roughly, and then erasing the lines that aren’t right works for me, so there’s been a little progress with the tablet.

· Paint more videos - learn how to use Adobe Flash: I don’t need the interactive capability of Flash right now, so am sticking to my old method of creating animations. I’ve started a computer painted video about archaeology – another PIP idea.

The final step is to define what needs to be done NOW – well, NEXT anyway. Right now, I’m taking a couple of weeks off to gather more painting subject material sketching in the Rockies, and confer with my grandson about the drawings he’s doing for my graphic novel. My next blog posts will be near the end of July, and will be about the real Rockies and virtual Hong Kong