One-off cards I’ve painted recently

Cascade Ponds at Banff

watercolour card

©2025 Charlene Brown

Spirit bear mother and cubs

watercolour card

©2025 Charlene Brown

Lakes above O’Hara

watercolour card 5” x 7”

©2025 Charlene Brown

Fall flowers in the Valley of the 10 Peaks

watercolour card 5" x 7"

©2025 Charlene Brown

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.  

 

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. 

 

 

When we weren’t allowed to go to Alberta

Victoria Glacier from Mt. Fairview

watercolour and crayon

©2025 Charlene Brown

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.

We’ve lived here longer than anywhere

Victoria
watercolour and crayon
©2009 Charlene Brown

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.

Life in the city we’d never heard of in 1990

Dubai
watercolour and marker
©1995 Charlene Brown

When my husband started working for Emirates Airline, the company had two Airbus 300 aircraft and one of his first jobs was to fly a third one down from the factory in Europe. The skyline of the city itself was dominated by its mosques, all facing directly west to Mecca.

Emirates now has hundreds of Airbus and Boeing planes, and the coastline shown in this painting is packed with shopping malls and skyscrapers including Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. I’m pretty sure that everyone has heard of Dubai by now!

After a shaky start (the Gulf War just about emptied the place a few months after we got there) an astonishing amount of Dubai’s expansion took place during our ten years there.

 

The many moves of the Seventies and Eighties…

 Toronto, as seen from Mississauga
watercolour and crayon
©2017 Charlene Brown

After being transferred from Colorado back to Canada, we lived in Ottawa again, this time for eight years, then two years in Vancouver before Ottawa again, this time for only three years.  Then we left our government jobs and my husband went to work for Wardair in Toronto.  We lived several miles south of the airport near Lake Ontario, in Missisauga.

We probably would have stayed there until my husband retired, but the airline was bought by CP Air, and the former Wardair pilots sensed that their future prospects were less than excellent.  Many began looking elsewhere, and twelve of them including my husband, were scooped up by a brand new, rapidly expanding airline many of us had never heard of.  In 1990 we moved abruptly to a city we also hadn’t heard of and had only recently located on a map of the Middle East. I’ll tell you about it next week.

My first logical move

 Ottawa
watercolour, ink and marker
©2017 Charlene Brown 

In the summer of 1968, the Canadian government launched a cross-country recruitment drive for computer programmers.  Fortunately for me, one of the departments requiring more programmers was Fisheries and Forestry.  

Within two months, we’d moved to Ottawa, found an apartment and a babysitter, and I’d settled into my new job (the first one ever for which I was completely qualified). Within a year, I’d had a promotion and a retroactive raise and actually bought some furniture! And I’d met an RCAF pilot of whom I was quite fond.  

But this happy situation looked to be falling apart a few months later when he was transferred to Colorado Springs…  Fortunately, undeterred by the fact my daughter and I were kind of a ‘package deal’ he returned to Ottawa briefly at Christmas time in 1970, married me and our next move was to join him in Colorado.  

There’s a painting of Colorado in my May 11 blog post, and in the next post I talked about how this painting launched this series about places I used to live.

“We lived in Colorado Springs for a couple of years (in fact our younger daughter was born there) and the painting gave me an idea for a series of blog posts.” 

Alberta ̶ where I lived first and where I still say I'm from

Banff
watercolour and crayon
©2023 Charlene Brown

I was born in Banff, lived there until I finished high school, and returned to work there each summer until I finished university.

This is the only one of my Alberta paintings in which the place looks almost exactly the same as when I lived there.

Edmonton
watercolour and crayon
©2016 Charlene Brown

I lived in Edmonton from 1959 to 1962, my first three years at the University of Alberta.  However, the city pictured here was not there at the time. The only structures in this painting that I remember from my university days are the Provincial Legislature on the far left and the Fairmont MacDonald Hotel, which is just about exactly in the middle – and it is quite different from the MacDonald I remember. Back then, the hotel had a huge ‘Brutalist’ addition, and the whole structure was referred to as a ‘tiny perfect chateau and the box it came in.’ Anyway, the box has been removed, and dozens of much nicer boxes have been added to form today’s Edmonton skyline.

Calgary
watercolour, crayon and marker
©2012 Charlene Brown         

My final year at University of Alberta was completed at the Calgary campus, UAC, which became the University of Calgary a few years later. 

This painting of Calgary was based on photos I took from a 2012 WestJet flight to Calgary and most of the buildings in it– bank towers, Calgary Tower, Suncor (the fact the building is red is only part of the reason it was initially referred to as Red Square), the Bow Building, Olympic Park ski jump, and the Alberta Children’s Hospital  ̶  were not there when I was at university.