Sketching During The Canicule

I’m still trying to integrate my life as a sketcher with my life as a gimpy old man with a bad wrist but I’m finding the problems managable, which makes me happy as a clam.  An arthritic clam for sure, but a happy one.

I just got back from Montreal.  Went there with a friend and thus I didn’t get to sketch at all, but when I got back I contacted my buddy Yvan about sketching.  We decided to head to what was Quebec City’s zoo.  A small portion of it has been turned into a park and we figured we could find some shade there and something to draw.

Shade was more important than subject because we’re in the middle of canicule, the time when we start feeling foolish for having complained so much about the cold.  Called the ‘dog days of summer’ in English, or on the streets, ‘hotter-than-hell,’ this is the time of people go to hospitals with heat exhaustion.  We went sketching.

Truth is, it hasn’t been horrible for us on planet Quebec City because while temps and humidity are very high, we’ve had a nice breeze which has kept conditions tolerable.  Oh, and we had shade, lots of shade.  We decided to draw the entry gate to the park.  It’s a great subject and I didn’t do it justice.

I have to say that I’m out of practice.  While I include my drawing and seeing skills in this mostly I’m talking about my juggling skills.  I only have two hands and a mouth that can sometimes provide hand-like assistance, so drawing and painting while sitting on a stool is a practiced skill.  On this day I was dropping things constantly.  My paper towel blew away several times.  The water spilled.  I knocked my palette off its perch.  But I got to sketch and that’s what was important.  Not my best sketch ever but sketching isn’t about what you produce, or it shouldn’t be.  Here it is, warts and all.

4 thoughts on “Sketching During The Canicule

  1. I’m going to quote this blog post this winter when you start whining about the cold. 😉 Nice shading on the conical/cylindrical structure!

    – Tina

    • Ha…you’ll have to pry my Cold-Weather-Complaint License from my cold dead hands. I’ll note that I reported on the hot weather but never once complained about it. In fact, I wrote the phrase, stupid in hindsight, that it wasn’t too bad. That’s stupid because so far, 33 people have died in the province because of the heat wave. I’ll keep sketching but I confess that it IS hot 🙂

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