Just got a new paint box! I don’t smoke, but could not resist the incredibly cool art-deco fonts and panther design on the lid. All the way from from Belgium via Etsy.com. Some of you will probably know that it used to hold cigars… very small cigars, evidently.

If you’re picturing a big old stogie, the tin is much smaller than that.

It has a cool illustration inside the lid too. Too bad I covered it up with half-pans!

Raw Sienna goes in the empty spot. (I had just poured it and set it aside to cure.) Really makes me ridiculously happy how perfectly half-pans fit inside. The empties in the lid are mixing spaces. There’s no guarantee this palette will be level at any moment, so wide-open-spaces don’t serve well. Only thing it is really lacking is a thumb ring or some such thing, but I’ll hack that on eventually.

I could not resist painting it, along with my waterbrush. The inscription up the side says, “These two, the book they’re painted in, and a paper towel… and I am set!” It’s all I need to go paint. 6″ x 9″ Twinrocker in a handmade sketchbook. Micron black pen with PV55, Raw Sienna, Ultramarine blue, and PO62 just on the letters. Haven’t done a lot of ink-and-wash type paintings, but really like what the pen added to this one. A light wash of Raw Sienna perfectly matches the cream color on the top of the tin.

Here it is with the painting. I ghosted the color chart behind the tin, as it was pretty hard to see with all those competing colors. (It looks pasted on, but the tin was actually on the book when I shot it.) The chart at the top is the 20 colors inside the Panter tin, the ghosted colors are now in the Newman’s Own mint tin that used to be my regular palette. That’s also a complete palette, but represents alternatives and specialties like some of the Primateks. The Panter tin is now my everyday go-to palette; with it alone I could handle about anything I’m likely to encounter on a walk. The sketchbook pages are about 6″ x 9″, to give you the scale of the tin. I painted it larger than life, then painted the waterbrush to its scale.

Great fun and I’m really happy with the way it turned out.