Painting with the Al Frescoes at the Chinese Cemetery

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Feng Shui

Watercolour and gouache

©2012 Charlene Brown

This was going to be the outing where I completed a painting that included the other people in our group… but they just didn’t line up properly with the obligatory mountain background and the grave markers I wanted to include in my picture.

What did line up was the cemetery itself, the site having been chosen for its excellent Feng Shui. It is flanked by the Azure Dragon, Qinglong, to the east and by the White Tiger, Baihu, on the west, and embraced by the Living Water, Shengshui, of Juan de Fuca Strait and Gonzales Bay, Those who are buried here command a Grand Hall, Mingtang, in front and face a distant Worshiping Mountain Range, Chaoshan, the Olympics.

Virtual Paintout in Tasmania

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Cockle Creek Road

Watercolour

©2012 Charlene Brown

The Virtual Paintout is in Tasmania this month.  I have a painting of Lake Oberon in the Western Arthur Range on my website, Paint Every Mountain, so I looked in that spectacularly beautiful part of the state for a Google Streetview first of all. I soon discovered, however, that the Google camera car didn’t make it south of Scotts Peak Road. So I went looking for more accessible spots and found this lovely Streetview of Cockle Creek Road on the coast only about 50 kilometres southwest of Hobart. Here is a link to it.

Adding people (at a safe distance) to a painting

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Painting at Willows Beach

Watercolour

©2012 Charlene Brown

Whenever I’m painting with a group, I’m fascinated by the painters who can incorporate the people around them, including the Roving Art Critics, into their pictures. Katherine Tyrrell does this a lot and does it very well, so I decided to have another look at her article about sketching people … and was particularly encouraged by a couple of things she said not to do:

• “Don’t draw faces. If people can't be identified they can neither object nor can they be upset if your drawing of them isn't flattering.”  Katherine simply concentrates on getting the bodies and posture looking right… to which I would add clothing – it’s pretty easy to get that looking approximately right.
• “Don’t assume they'll be annoyed. I've had people (approach me) more than once to see how the drawing of them turned out.” That’s easy for her to say, you might be thinking, because her drawings always turn out beautifully…

But she’s right! Even other artists, who could probably do it better, got a kick out of recognizing their hat or something in my picture. Admittedly, I only began this drawing while on location at Willows Beach – actually completing a painting with people in it will be the next big step in the Drama of Painting Plein Air.

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.