Have you noticed that the news exaggerates everything?  They no longer report.  Rather, they compete with Downton Abbey and football games for viewers and will do everything and anything to make their program entertaining.  I expect that soon, Captain America or Thor will replace Wolf Blitzer as anchor of CNN.

It’s really sad.  The week we were told about how Canada was “colder than Mars” a couple days ago.  While it’s true that, for a period of a few hours, a part of Canada was colder than where NASA’s robot was on Mars, but Canada didn’t get to -200C when the sun went down like it does on Mars.

Heck, we only got down to -40C and it had warmed all the way up to -36C by the time I got the bright idea to walk to the museum to meet my buddies for a sketching session.   For those who are Fahrenheit-challenged, -40C is -40F.  Warmer than Mars on a summer’s eve for sure, but still sort of cold by freeze your skin standards.

So off I went, the intrepid sketcher, walking as fast as I could on a 40-minute walk to the museum.  A smarter sketcher would have just hopped on a bus but no, I “needed the exercise.”

By the time I got there I realized that I’d been crazy.  I could no longer feel my fingers in spite of the heavy gloves I was wearing.  My face was on fire and the I was starting to think in terms of how much further I could walk before I’d fall over.

But I finally arrived…warmth.  Next problem was how to sketch when I couldn’t feel the pen.  I walked around for about 15 minutes before deciding to do a looser sketch than my typical approach, maybe as a result of Liz Steel’s course.  I sat down in front of the largest head in the Olympus display.  It’s at least two-feet tall and very impressive – more impressive than this sketch suggests.  My fountain pens were really cold so I used a Uniball Vision Fine hybrid gel pen, adding a hint of color with Faber-Castell watercolor pencils.  Of course, it was drawn in a Stillman & Birn Alpha series sketchbook (10×7).

We took a break, had some tea, and then did a bit more sketching before calling it a day.  I took the bus home, a nice, warm bus.