2010 Year-end Review

Royal Roads
Photoshopped watercolour
2010 Charlene Brown

Here's how I think I did with repect to following my plan for 2010:

Paint more spontaneously - very little progress here though I was pleased with the way Mt. Assiniboine turned out in September. When I began abstracting paintings of the Victoria area, I found I had to resort to computer 'abstracting' to get results I liked. The abstracted version of Royal Roads University, originally posted October 27, is an example of this. Do more journaling - I wrote 'illustrated journal' posts about a trip to Mexico in February, a Panama cruise in April-May, a trip to the Rockies in July, and flashbacks to the twentieth century using excerpts of articles published in the 1990s. Continue to participate in group blogs - I completed 12 Virtual Paintout entries and was pleased to see Places to Paint: Charlene Brown's Rockies featured on The Art of the Landscape. Write more how-to articles - I wrote The Extreme Sport of Watercolour Painting for Empty Easel in April. Finish graphic novel and learn how to use Wacom tablet - Yes! I published my comic book in October... but as for using the tablet, I discovered outsourcing! The characters in Counter-Espionage Disinformation for Beginners were drawn by my grandson, Philip Hogg . I did eventually learn how to use the tablet in the Animation and SFX class at the Gulf Islands Film and Television School. Paint more videos and learn how to use Adobe Flash - I learned the basics of this at film school, and completed videos about archaeology (the First War Movie) and A Year in the Butchart Gardens
I'll write a post early in the new year, showing how my goals for 2011 reflect those set out for 2010 (or not).

Butchart Gardens: the video

Winter in Butchart Gardens
computer-painted video
Charlene Brown 2010

I liked the way Photoshop 'abstracted' my painting of Butchart Gardens so much that I made it into a 0ne-minute video showing what this magical place looks like year-round. This picture shows the sunken garden as it looked (briefly) a couple of weeks ago. Since then, the Christmas illuminations, featuring the Twelve Days of Christmas, have been turned on, and Day Five is in this part of the garden, as you will see if you have a look at the video on Youtube.

Virtual Paintout in County Clare

I hope this is County Clare!

Watercolour and crayon

©2010 Charlene Brown

It’s pretty easy to find lovely landscapes in County Clare, the location of this month’s Virtual Paintout. I did have one problem (mentioned by some of the others who have sent pictures in to the Virtual Paintout) – sometimes there’s no way of knowing if you’ve driven into another, equally-lovely county. Limerick, for example.

It was only when I started to draw this scene and zoomed in on the Streetview picture to get a better idea of some of the details, that I even noticed the herd of cows and the buildings! Here’s a link to it – have a look and you’ll see what I mean.

The first war movie

Battle of Kadesh

Bas relief mural

13^th Century B.C.E.

This mural, on the second pylon of the Ramesseum near Luxor in Egypt, is said to be a multiple image representation of Ramses II driving a chariot into battle against the Hittites at Kadesh. I decided to break out the ‘moving’ parts and use them to computer-paint a ‘war movie’ video. 

(Another theory about the mural has it that the multiple legs simply indicate there are two horses pulling Ramses’ chariot, but I prefer the ‘action shot’ version of the story…)

The only gaits that the precisely spaced bas relief legs lent themselves to were bounding and pacing. Bounding doesn't work for horses and I don’t think horses rear up on their hind legs while pacing… So both possibilities need modification. What we have is either a rearing pacer or a mincing bounder. 

You can see the resulting 30-second video on Youtube … and assuming Ramses didn’t scatter the Hittites driving a pacer, his horse must be bounding (carefully) into battle…

BTW, history tells us that Ramses wasn’t as victorious at Kadesh as his murals would have us believe… Maybe he really did have a pacer pulling his chariot!

Update on the Victoria Abstracts

High Rock Park

Photoshopped watercolour

©2010 Charlene Brown

I’ve completed painting abstract versions of the three Victoria pictures I posted beginning October 27. This is not one of them.

You know how sometimes when you’re not happy with a painting you’ve just finished and put it aside for a few days, then look at it with fresh eyes, and it looks surprisingly more successful, or at least has some potential you hadn’t noticed…? Well, that didn’t happen with my abstract paintings – in fact, they were worse every time I looked at them. So I tried Photoshopping my original paintings, and am quite pleased with the results! I’ll post the others sometime in December.

High Rock Park looks pretty much like the representative version in the size shown here, so please be sure to click on the picture to enlarge it and see how Photoshop handles the picky details.

I liked the Photoshop version of Butchart Gardens so much I’m making it into a video… and working on that got me further side-tracked into doing something about an archaeological video I mentioned way back in July in my mid-year review. I’ll post that as soon as it’s finished.

Another twentieth century flashback

From a moving train

Watercolour and ink

©1996 Charlene Brown

Canadian ‘Group of Seven’ painter Lawren Harris is said to have leaped from a moving train in his eagerness to begin a day of sketching in the Canadian Rockies. In the fall of 1996, I could have done that too, but took the less rigorous approach of doing the sketching itself from the moving train. It is hard to imagine a pleasanter way to travel.,,

This painting shows the dazzling outlook from Switzerland’s Glacier Express over the baroque village of Andermatt. This spectacular view actually alternated from left to right during the serpentine climb toward the early October snowline.

Speaking of dazzling, the best ice fields are often on the north slopes of the Alps, and their most spectacular aspects are seen by looking south. Around noon, that means facing pretty well straight into the sun. (in June of last year I wrote a blog post mentioning you get the same effect looking north in the Andes) Photographs from inside a train are dominated by the window’s reflection of brightly lit hands and camera. The only way to get a nice picture is with fairly sophisticated photographic equipment – or, of course, paintbrushes.

Abstract of Butchart Gardens (not)

Changtse, Everest, Lhotse and Nuptse

Watercolour monotype

©1998 Charlene Brown

The abstract of the Butchart Gardens still needs a surprising amount of work for something that was supposed to be spontaneous and bold (and really quick). So here’s another flashback to the twentieth century, complete with cautionary note about printmaking (see below).

At the Banff Mountain Book Festival in 1997, it seemed like I was one of only about five people who had never climbed Everest. I didn’t even have painting it on my bucket list… So it was fairly surprising when, four months later, I found myself in Nepal attempting to get to a good spot to do just that by climbing from Changa Narayana to Nagarcot. After taking four hours to complete the ‘three-hour’ climb to this vantage point, and discovering Everest was still barely visible, I realized I was going to have to get closer to paint it. I also realized I’d better do it the easy way – using photographs taken from a Buddha Air flight from Kathmandu to Everest and back, non-stop.

I was lucky enough to get two perfect shots as we circled by Changtse, Everest, Lhotse and Nuptse. I later combined them and used the monotype printmaking process I outlined in another twentieth century flashback.

In fact, I think the whole thing is too close to the subject, and was never that pleased with the composition. I’m only showing it here so I can include the above-mentioned cautionary reminder about printmaking… The clouds streaming from the Himalayan peaks were created by removing blue paint from the printing plate with a wet tissue. They were not part of the original drawing – done while I was being careful to do everything in reverse. The result – clouds on Everest apparently driven by an east wind – almost never happens, I am told.

Virtual Paintout in Rio de Janeiro

From Estrada do Sumaré

Watercolour and crayon

©2010 Charlene Brown

When I learned the Virtual Paintout was in Rio de Janeiro this month, my first thought was to paint a beach scene including the fantastic Gaudi sidewalk (yes, THE Gaudi designed the sidewalk there!) but then I couldn’t find a scene I liked. I discovered later that several painters – have a look at the Virtual Paintout entries from Horst Hittenberger, Trevor Davies, Jennie Stewart and Jeri Risin – found great ‘Gaudis’ to paint, but somehow I missed them all.

I chose a panorama view from the road up to the statue of Christ the Redeemer instead. Here’s the link to it BTW, along one stretch of the road near the top, the Google camera picked up a leaf, and included it in every ninth picture for several kilometres! I’ve been wondering how many other people noticed that leaf.