A few days of summer

Last week we enjoyed some glorious days of summer. The thermometer went up into the twenties (in Celsius, of course) and stayed and stayed and stayed. This week we are back to spring in Montreal, but that’s ok because I enjoyed the foretaste of summer while it was here.

Fortunately those days coincided with a visit from a friend, and I was able to tour her around the city and stop at my favourite sketching spots. She’s a sketcher too, so we made the most of the blue skies and spectacular weather. One of our stops was in Pointe Claire Village, where we bought some sandwiches, had a picnic by the lake, and sketched the just-launched boats at the yacht club. We were sitting in the blazing sun (who wants to sit in the shade on the first hot day??) so I sketched very quickly, but it gave me a good chance to try out my new Lintner palette too.

You can see the palette below. It’s a pretty cool setup but I’ve only tried it once, so I can’t it give a full write-up until I’ve used it a few more times. In the meantime, I filled the 8 full-pan wells with a split triad (a warm and a cool of each of the primary colours) plus Raw Sienna and Burnt Sienna. That seemed to work well for most of the sketch but I had to dip into my friend’s palette for a few dots of turquoise that I needed for the sail covers. What I can say about the palette is that I appreciate having the full size pans for the colours I use most often AND the palette has deep mixing areas which makes me very happy since I often use very juicy washes when I’m sketching in my A4 Hahnemuhle sketchbook. More to come on this!