California Adventure on the Sea-to-Sky Highway

Do you see what I see?

Watercolour

©2012 Charlene Brown

Does anyone besides me think, “California Adventure" whenever they see this bear mountain rock formation on the highway coming south from Whistler?  By 'bear mountain' I mean the bear-shaped artificial mountain at  Disneyland. 

On the right is a picture of this California Adventure bear, the one that’s actually in California. And here’s a link to my California Adventure bear on Google Streetview. What do you think?

BTW, my bear is only slightly more natural than the Disneyland version – it’s what was left of a ridge blasted out when the Sea-to-Sky Highway was widened for the Olympics.

Winterizing photos

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Thunderbird Corner

Watercolour and marker

©2012 Charlene Brown

This painting of the No.16 Corner of the luge run at the Whistler Sliding Centre is based on a couple of photos I took just two weeks ago.Right now, however, this area (at the final corner where the track circles round a vertical wall and heads back uphill to the finish line) is covered in lush green grass and the track itself is bare concrete...

For winter colour and shadow reference, I was able to use some pictures I took during a race three years ago.  But I had to get Google to find me a picture of a luge rounding the Thunderbird corner during the Winter Olympics, in order to know where to put it in the painting. On the right is my only photo of this part of the track.  I managed to take it just after my grandson went by, so it wasn't really helpful.

The drama of painting plein air

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West coast waterfall

Watercolour, crayon and marker

©2012 Charlene Brown

I was out with the Al Frescoes   again, this time at Witty’s Lagoon, west of Victoria. 

Because of the sound of the waterfall, I didn’t realize that a line of hikers was filing past me – until a big black dog planted his pointy face on my painting and smiled up at me.

Leaping out of your seat is quite a conversation-starter. The dog’s owners were very apologetic and almost frantically effusive about my painting.

As always, I was trying to shift away from a straight-up representational landscape toward something more stylized, but still recognizable – but I suspected that if it weren’t for the waterfall being right in front of us, they wouldn’t have recognized it…

Virtual Paintout in Thailand

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Mahamakut Buddhist University

Watercolour and gouache

©2012 Charlene Brown

The Virtual Paintout is in Thailand this month, with a choice of finding a spot to paint in an area stretching from Bangkok to Phuket in the south, or the area around Chiang Mai in the north. I picked Chiang Mai, and hit the jackpot on my first try – Phrapokkloa Road, where there seems to be no end of very paintable cityscapes.

I picked this view of a restoration project on a stupa at Mahamakut Buddhist University because it includes an illustration of the project on the sign on the left, providing a nice balance, I think. Here’s the link to the real thing.

Composite Viewpoints in Landscape Painting

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Whistler Sliding Centre

Watercolour

©2012 Charlene Brown

‘Composite Viewpoints’ is the term I’ve chosen to introduce the fact I couldn’t find a spot from which I could actually see everything I wanted to include in this painting – the sliding centre, a few Whistler and Blackcomb ski runs, the Overlord Glacier and Alta Lake.

This happens to me a lot, and has resulted in the occasional Drama of Painting Plein Air, where roving art critics point out the error of my ways.

Some of the dramas – in Peru, Malta, Egypt, Tunisia and Honduras – have been mentioned before. 

Other 'composite viewpoint' paintings, such as one in Alexandria, which includes the Pharos Lighthouse (one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World no longer in existence) and Tehuacalco, in Mexico, were like this painting of Whistler – they didn’t elicit any drama because nobody was there when I lined up my fragmentary photos, sketches and site maps (and in the case of Alexandria, illustrations from Wikipedia) to compose the final image.

Painting plein air with a flash mob

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Haro Strait shipping lane

Watercolour and gouache

©2012 Charlene Brown

My April 26 post included a conversation with a roving artcritic at Copan  that led me to think a less defensive, more confident approach to The Drama of Painting Plein Air would be a good idea… and a pleasantly confident approach might be a great idea. 

I got a chance to test this thought when I joined a plein air painting group, the Al Frescoes at Willows Beach here in Victoria. The Al Frescoes operate on a flash mob basis… gathering anytime after nine every Friday morning at a location that’s been emailed to everyone a couple of days in advance.  During the morning, quite a few of us took time to wander around and look at other works-in-progress.

I should mention that when the following Drama of Painting Plein Air took place, Haro Strait shipping lane was pretty insipid, and the clouds were too dark and just about everything else was too light. I wanted to be open to input from anyone who offered a suggestion. So, for the first time, I resisted the temptation to display my expertise by launching into a listing of my painting’s faults.

Fellow watercolour artist (the best kind of roving art critic): Mind if I look?

Artist: Of course not – I’ve just been doing the same thing myself.

RAC: I see you’re still at the ethereal stage... pale Prussian blue is a great way to start Mt. Baker.

Artist: I wish I could be adventurous like the acrylic or oil painters. (I had noticed that a lot of them  kept painting over their pale but realistic starts with just about every colour they’d brought along.)

RAC: They have the luxury of being able to go back to ‘ethereal’ if ‘bold and dark’ goes wrong. But we’ve always got gouache! That cloud bank around the mountain cries out for gouache!

Artist: What a great idea!  But I didn’t bring gouache because I always use it fresh out of the tube and I don’t bring tubes on location.

RAC: Those clouds will still be crying out for gouache when you get home.  It’s better to wait until your painting is really dry anyway – then you get to decide how much colour to stir up with the stuff…

Experiments with painting cards

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Four winter cards

Watercolour

©2012 Charlene Brown

When I painted folding cards like this a couple of weeks ago, I taped them flat on the board – and when I removed the tape, a bit of one of the paintings ripped off.

So this time I folded the cards before taping them down, two of them with just the back of the card taped (and protected) and two with the whole thing taped, as shown in the picture on the right.

As you might guess from this picture, The top ones were more difficult to work on, with the paint finding its way over the flapping edges of the paper.  Besides that, I prefer the results of the bottom ones – I like the paintings to have a white border. So from now on, I’ll be painting with tape all round the folded card.

Virtual Paintout in Latvia

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Bank at the end of the Bridge

Watercolour

©2012 Charlene Brown

The Virtual Paintout is in Latvia this month. I’ve noticed that several people have found good Google Streetviews to paint in some of the smaller cities – but I headed straight for Riga as I know there are some great church spires there.  I was out on a bridge trying to find a spot with a panoramic view that might include two or three of these when I noticed the bridge itself and the building at the other end of it had arranged themselves in what I thought was a pretty terrific design.  Hope you agree.  It reminds me of a bridge I painted about a year ago  when the Virtual Paintout was in Japan.