Virtual Paintout in Fairbanks, Alaska and points north

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Koyukuk River crossing

Watercolour, crayon and CP

©2011 Charlene Brown

The Virtual Paintout is in Fairbanks, Alaska and points north this month. I spotted this mountain in Google Streetview from a spot on the Dalton Highway (North Slope Haul Road) northwest of Fairbanks, then switched to Google Map view to find some water for the foreground.  Just north of the Koyukuk River crossing looked like a pretty good bet… and it was! Here’s a link to it.

Keeping up with the kids

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Archaeological site at Copan, Honduras

Watercolour and crayon

©2011 Charlene Brown

The setting of Copan reminded me a little of Tehuacalco, a place I wrote about in A surprise near Acapulco   last year. Copan is far more extensive, with way more structures and stelae and huge, epiphyte-laden trees, whereas Tehuacalco was more spread out and less jungle-like. And it seemed easier to climb…  Of course, that may have been because at Tehuacalco we weren’t all trying to keep up with our grandkids!

Construction at Copan began in the 3^rd century C.E. (page 5 in Timeline - History of Design) and the corbelled arch, temple, hieroglyphic stairway, and ball court shown here were built in the 7^th and 8^th centuries. BTW, the hieroglyphic stairway is currently under a protective tarpaulin, making it tricky, but not impossible, to paint – it is pretty much impossible to photograph!

Hand-painted postcards from round the World

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Comox Glacier

Watercolour postcard

©2011 Charlene Brown

This is the postcard I sent to Alison Staite in London – my June contribution to A Postcard from my Walk. There’s a new post every couple of days on this blog, and the quality and variety of the artwork is fascinating! Have a look…
There’s still no sign of the postcards I sent from Honduras last month, but I am absolutely thrilled with the July postcard I received from Desiree in the United States – I talked about it here.

Day 2 on the reef, and a spectacularly paintable discovery

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Pico Bonito, as seen from the island of Utila

Watercolour, watercolour pencils and crayons

©2011 Charlene Brown

The Mesoamerican Barrier Reef extends from the northern tip of the Yucatan peninsula along the Mayan Riviera, past Belize and Guatemala to the Bay Islands of Honduras, Utila is the smallest of these islands.

The first painting I started on Utila focused entirely on what I could see of the coral beds looking down into the shallow water close to the shore (augmented by what I could remember of the underwater view I’d had during an inept couple of minutes of snorkeling.)

It wasn’t until the second morning we were on Utila that I discovered this stunning view looking back toward the Nombre de Dios (Name of God) mountains on the mainland of Honduras. They get a fair bit of rain on the mainland, so none of this was visible when we first arrived. Pico Bonito, on the right, is the tallest peak in this part of the range.

Coffee day on a Road Scholar inter-generational adventure

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A different sort of coffee truck

Watercolour and crayon

©2011 Charlene Brown

We’ve all heard great things about shade-grown coffee – well, here’s another one. If you’re going mountain climbing on a coffee plantation, a shady one can be wonderfully cool on a hot July day in Honduras! I should mention we didn’t actually climb up the mountain, but were taken up in the truck you see here (first coffee truck we’d ever seen with seating for 25). At the top the kids planted a couple of dozen coffee bushes, sort of ably-assisted by all of us grandparents – it couldn’t have taken us more than 10 times as long as the regular workers…  Then we climbed down 1143 steps carved into the steep slope, through a jungle ravine past lush coffee and flower gardens to the processing area, where we had a picnic of hot tamales and coffee (what else?) beside this waterfall.

An unusually restful day in Honduras

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Cannonball tree

Watercolour and crayon

©2011 Charlene Brown

This is what you see if you look up through the lower branches of one of the huge Couroupita guianensis lining the roads at the Lancetilla Botanical Garden.

I had big painting plans for my Road Scholar Inter-generational trip to Honduras with my grandson… but we were kept so busy swimming in rivers, pools and the Caribbean, snorkeling on the reef, whitewater rafting on the Rio Humuya, hiking in the rain forest, planting coffee bushes, and watching our grandkids play soccer with the local kids, I didn’t actually complete anything!  Well I did mail two postcards to other Postcard From My Walk participants, but I’m only now completing the rest of my (barely) started cards, such as Cannonball tree, or turning them into full-size paintings.

10 Painting things to take to Honduras

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Whitewater Rafting on the Urubamba, painted following a previous intergenerational expedition

Watercolour, crayon and ink
©2009 Charlene Brown

I'm setting out this evening with our 10-year-old grandson on a Road Scholar (used to be Elderhostel) intergenerational adventure, Exploring Honduras: Coral Reefs and Mayan Ruins. I've assembled what I hope will be the perfect array of art supplies for the trip. I’m hoping my grandson will paint too, and my list of things we’ll need is based on a couple of the blog posts I wrote two years ago when I took his older brother to Peru – 12 Painting things to take to Peru and 5 things I learned about painting in the Andes.

1. coil bound watercolour sketch book with map and archaeology notes about the Mayan civilization
2. watercolour postcards
3. pencils, sharpener, and eraser
4. crayons and Masquepen masking fluid to use as resists. The wax crayon resist stays in the picture, but I’ll take a piece of crepe to remove the Masqupen when the paintings are dry
5. Koi watercolor pocket field sketch box, with waterbrush
6. palette in a Ziploc bag – with a few favourites that are not included in Koi set – Perylene green, cobalt blue deep, Opera, metallic copper, and Quinacridone Gold.
7. flat and round paint brushes in plastic holder
8. glue stick .for collage
9. Ziploc bags for ephemera – extra stuff and things not immediately suitable for collage. (Plasticized ice cream bar wrappers, for example, have great designs, but can only be glued after scanning and printing on more suitable paper)
10. Camera with extra battery and charger. Apparently Honduras has the same wiring as North America, so this should be easier than previous battery charging efforts…
    
    

Mid-Year Review 2011

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Quebec City

       Watercolour and crayon

       ©2011 Charlene Brown

       Here are a couple of highlights concerning progress on The Plan for 2011:

        In the area of travel journaling, I’ve got a good start on a really big project I’ve been putting off since 2000  – an illustrated journal of our two-month Retirement Grand Tour of Europe on our way back to Canada from Dubai. I used several painted postcards I retrieved from people I’d sent them to at the time, and completed six new paintings for this journal, which was posted during the May-June period corresponding to the trip itself.

       I’ve participated in all six Virtual Paintouts so far this year (Boston, Romania, Cape Town, Japan, Côte d'Azur, and New Zealand, and am having a great time sending and receiving hand-painted postcards from round the world on A Postcard From My Walk.  I’m really pleased to be participating in the group blog – the quality and variety of the artwork is fascinating! Have a look…

       I completed a project about poster production, Making Art with Impact, involving a combination of computer collage and lettering. I’m planning to do more of this ‘poster art’ involving background paintings of Canadian landscapes and cityscapes. This painting of Quebec City will be part of this plan.

       I’d also like to mention something not even in The Plan, that I learned quite accidentally, about observation skills, seeing relationships and relative positions and all that… I wrote about this in Seeing what you’re looking at  Although I can’t say I’ll always see what I’m looking at from now on, this was a big step in the right direction.