My favourite place to paint

Mt. Assiniboine, including Lakes Magog, Sunburst, Cerulean and Elizabeth

Watercolour and crayon

©2010 Charlene Brown

When Katherine Tyrrell asked us to talk about our favourite places to paint on the Art of the Landscape, I first thought of Mt. Assiniboine, as I was just there this summer. Then I thought of Lake O’Hara, then Moraine Lake… Then I decided to just name the Canadian Rockies, which has always been my favourite place to paint. I grew up in Banff, and until I was about eight, I was only vaguely aware that anybody painted anything but the Canadian Rockies.

As I wrote in a blog post at the beginning of this year, “There is a mystique to having lived in mountains. You never want to be away from them for too long, especially your own mountains. I love to go back to the Rockies as often as possible.” Here’s a link to my paintings of the Rockies on my blog

Five things I learned at Film School

Gulf Islands

Watercolour and crayon

©2010 Charlene Brown

1. How to use a Wacom tablet to create a simple running cycle in Adobe Flash, using only nine images – as well as how to replicate this sequence so your (rather ineptly-drawn) figure can go more than two steps.

2. Green screen filming of another running figure (me, actually) and how to ‘key out’ the green background using Adobe After Effects, producing a film clip with no background that can be placed in any setting. And we learned that some activities, running being one, don’t lend themselves very well to green screen filming, simply because you can’t really go anywhere – You must stay in front of the fairly narrow screen.

3. Replicated sequences and green screen clips can be used repeatedly with different backgrounds, using a compositing program such as Adobe Premiere Pro. This is an efficient way of producing otherwise painfully slow video ‘footage’ but must be done with finesse. Please check out my video Running Around North America to see the results of doing it without a lot of finesse …

4. Paintings of Google Streetviews make great background for computer animations, and if you use your own paintings you don’t have to concern yourself with copyright infringement. Fortunately, I was able to download paintings I have on my blog. I hadn’t taken any files or paintings with me, because I had planned on a little painting while I was there, but soon learned…

5. There is no time for anything but your project, while you’re at G.I.F.T.S. (Two other people did individual animation projects and two groups did documentaries, and one group wrote and produced a drama.)

It’s taken until now to unwind from the intensive five-day program and find time to paint Gulf Islands. It shows the view from the ferry leaving Galiano Island at the entrance to Active Pass, with Mayne Island on the right and the Point Roberts peninsula (part of Washington State) in the distance.

Graphic Novel Artwork

Ottawa, seen from Gatineau

Watercolour, ink and fluorescent marker

©2010 Charlene Brown

I haven’t finalized the layout for the two-page Epilogue spread in my graphic novel, Counter-espionage Disinformation for Beginners because I’ve added this illustration – the view out the window of the CSIS office to it. The office has moved across the Ottawa River (only in my imagination) because this is my comic book and I like the view from Gatineau. Included in this view is the National Gallery of Canada, the Chateau Laurier, the steep set of locks at the north end of the Rideau Canal, and the Parliament buildings. It was developed from the Google Streetview taken from the Quebec approach to the Interprovincial Bridge – a route I traveled many times back in the day.

Philip has sent me the figure drawings for the Epilogue, keeping the layers separate fortunately, as they're having to be moved around to accomodate this window and the view across the river. So we're still on schedule for finalization in time for printing in October! Please keep the 'edit' suggestions coming...

Virtual Paintout in Manhattan

Looking west along Park Row

Watercolour, crayon and ink

©2010 Charlene Brown

TheVirtual Paintout is on the island of Manhattan this month. Once again, I planned a semi-abstract design, and once again it became way more detailed and representative than I’d hoped it would be.

I began by removing the vertical perspective. This ‘third point’ perspective makes tall buildings appear to lean into the centre of the picture, and is an overpowering effect on Google Streetview, especially if you tilt the camera up. After that, I concentrated on achieving a loose, ‘painted once’ effect, and managed to stop before getting into as much picky detail as, for example, my previous Virtual Paintout picture of Halifax, another abstract-gone-wrong. Here is the link to this location in New York.

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.