From the post office

Posted: October 22, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | 14 Comments

When Canada Post’s striking employees came back on the job last week, I rushed off to the post office to mail a package. The post office in my town is on a busy commercial street but for the first time, I noticed these little red buildings in a field behind some stores. I guess I never noticed them in summer but in autumn they are quite striking with the yellow trees behind them.

I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to do some fall sketching so that I could try out my Lintner palette in the car. I used the universal clamp it comes with to attach it to my steering wheel.

I’ve been painting from my car for over a decade, and have always set up my palette on the passenger seat. But I have to say that it was pretty cool to have the palette and water containers just a few inches away from my painting surface. I keep a third water container in the cup holder between the seats so I can have a really big water reservoir to rinse my bigger brushes, but it’s really useful to have the smaller containers much closer than they used to be. And the clamp has two ball-heads on it so I can level the palette and keep my washes from dripping all over the car. No doubt I will still have paint splatters on the seats, but hopefully fewer than before.

A few days of summer

Posted: May 21, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | 26 Comments

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!