Marksmomagain, wow! Congratulations on the giant Prismacolor set! You can probably get replacements for the off center ones if you bring them back to the store and complain, though you’d have to take the replacements from open stock. Might be better to just order them from dick blick, since I haven’t had any internal breakage on open stock pencils from Blick. They move them too fast for them to get any rough handling, while the ones in stores often get knocked out of their slots and put back by customers but you can’t tell there’s damage until you try to sharpen it.

Wonderful range! They still take the lead for largest range of colored pencils and hung on to softest artist colored pencils tied with Derwent Coloursoft.

Rebecca, wonderful haul! Pastelbord is awesome stuff. I’ve painted on it and love the fine grained sanded texture, it holds a lot of layers and the boards are very sturdy. Aquabord is probably good too even though I haven’t tried it yet. Love that travel brush! It looks like the same kind as one of my favorites, an Escoda one. Great size too, size 10 is so useful and they keep a good point. Cool that the Sennelier oils sampler includes primaries, white and black, you could do anything with that sampler. They are always good about giving primaries as samples but the white and black with them is even better for oil painting.

Let me know how the Blockx watercolors handle. I love Daniel Smiths ones and Serpentine Genuine is a wonderful color, gorgeous rich green a bit like sap green but as a single pigment color it mixes even better. Lyra Polycolor are great pencils too, oil based and lovely. Soft and a little more transparent, you can get gorgeous effects with them and they layer well.

Sorry to hear about Rex. He was a beautiful dog, thank you for posting his photo. He looks so majestic. I feel for you losing him, he was a member of the family and their love is so deep.

Today my Blick package arrived with the great Sennelier Nesting Box set, plus three packs of origami paper, a Geometric Origami kit that will become some Christmas ornaments next year (it was discontinued, so got it while it was around, got it for grandson but he hasn’t taken an interest, decided I wanted one too) and a pack of 50 mat cutter blades. No running out of mat cutter blades and no need to sort through all those still-packed tubs and boxes to find the last pack of them. These will last till my daughter and son in law finish building my studio and I can unpack, probably long beyond.

Sennelier Nesting Box set of 24

I like those two brushes. I wasn’t sure if it had one or two, but it has size 8 and size 2 Raphael brushes. The sizes look a little small compared to the ones I see in other brands, but that makes the size 2 a perfect tiny details brush. Plenty of room in the box to drop in something else for a larger brush with a short handle. The porcelain palette is great, it’s got six large wells for mixing and the odd little embroidered cloth napkin looks very absorbent. I guess that’s just something to pick up spills.

I got involved in the Society for Creative Anachronism again, where we all dress up for the Current Middle Ages (As they should have been, minus plagues and sexism and such). I do scribe work, painting scrolls is always in demand because people are always winning tournaments or getting awards from the crown for various services, usually accompanied by original scrolls or pre-printed scrolls painted by members. I’ve been doing pre-prints but wanted to do some original scrolls and I’m signed up to teach a knotwork class at a big event in April.

Well, it occurred to me the wood box wasn’t a ridiculous extravagance, because when I dress up as an Italian Renaissance painter, lugging paint and painting supplies around in a wood box fits the atmosphere at the events. People usually slowly replace cardboard and plastic boxes with wooden chests and baskets in their gear. This box is perfect to hold some dip pens and gouache along with the original watercolors, right in the layer the napkin came in. I might move the napkin down to lay on the palette – duh, that’s what it’s for, cleaning off the palette. It’ll get colorful!

Signing up to do the class led to another Blick order. I replaced my Daniel Smith Iridescent Gold tube, which dried out when the lid broke, and bought my class supplies – an 18″ x 24″ whiteboard, four sets of five extra fine Sharpie pens for students to use, two 12-packs of Bargain Elementary Rulers, a four pack of whiteboard markers and a new C-Thru grid ruler marked for 8ths of an inch. It looks like it’s only an inch wide instead of two inches, but it also looks darn useful like my old one. If I like it, I’m going to get a dozen of those and stash them in all packs, drawers and drawing kits because I keep misplacing the one treasured old one I had.

Still needed for the class, I’ll be hitting Staples for cheap mechanical pencils, parchment paper or card stock plus 100 copies of the handout I still need to draw and ink. The pencils I’m thinking of come in bags of 8 or 10 for a couple of bucks but have white erasers included, solving the problem of making sure everyone gets an eraser. The whiteboard is going to be great for years for almost any classes I do. This is the first time in a decade that I’ll be doing a class, so I’m excited about it. I can’t count how many times I costed out getting cheap enough supplies that I wouldn’t have to charge the students a materials fee and they’d still go home with the means to start doing the thing the class was about, whatever that is.

Hehe, at least I found a justification for a wood box watercolor set. It was a stretch when I have way too many good artist grade watercolor sets and palettes, even a couple of other porcelain palettes. But this will work for something specialized. I’m still going to use a tin snips on the dried out tube and see if I can use it like a watercolor pan too, the Daniel Smith watercolors tend to rewet easily though some brands don’t.