It’s the end of April.  People who are smarter than me, and thus live in habitable places on Earth, are starting to tend their gardens, put their boats in the water, and they’re out sketching with their friends.  The internet tells me this is so.

That is not the case here in Quebec.  Most of our snow has melted, but it’s done so very slowly this year, not in the typical slush-creating manner.  This is because it just won’t warm up.   We’ve had a couple days where it seemed that spring had come but then old mom nature opens the fridge again and we’re back to wondering…will spring ever come?

And so it was when I decided to try out my new arthritis gloves.  Huh?  Yes, arthritis gloves.  A friend of mine bought them for me because I suffer from the problem; he’s a really nice guy, and he saw them in a store.  He has also heard me talk about wanting thin gloves with no fingers for sketching and so he bought them.  For the arthritis, they’re sort of like wrapping an ankle with an ace bandage.  The pressure just feels good.

None of that is important here.  What’s important is their use as sketching gloves and I can say they are ideal.  Unlike other fingerless gloves I’ve tried, they are tight-fitting, thin gloves with no seams in the way and the fingerless endseams don’t get in the way of my pen.  I can draw with them as though I weren’t wearing gloves at all.

Gloves, however, don’t keep an Arizona boy warm when it’s cold outside so there were compromises made when I went outside to try them out.  I just walked down to the end of my street, which dead-ends into a large exposition building complex, sat down on my stool in the middle of a parking lot (unused at the time) and decided to see what kind of building sketch I could do in 10 minutes.  I figured that would be all I could endure and I was just about right.  Color was done quickly with a minimal watercolor set and a waterbrush and I did exceed the 10-minute timer beep by about 30-seconds as I slapped on some finishing sky.  It’s not much but I got to sketch outdoors and try my gloves.

As I came home, the guys who were doing brickwork on the house next to mine were packing up for the day.  They told me they had to quit because their mortar was freezing.  Maybe it’ll warm up tomorrow.