I always mix my own paint colors as a rule — I've owned only cyan, magenta, and yellow (plus black and white) for years — but I've been really into nontraditional primaries lately. It's an interesting challenge that produces interesting paintings, and the Zorn palette is a particularly... limiting limited palette.
The Zorn palette is named for Anders Zorn, a Swedish painter who used it extensively in his work. It consists of cadmium red light, yellow ochre, ivory black, and titanium white, a color selection that locks you out of blue and most shades of green. If you're using the Zorn palette for portraits, this isn't a major limitation, but landscapes are a different story (and guess what I've been using it for)...
I'm not an adult Lego connoisseur by any means, but I've received a handful of the adult/collector sets as gifts over the years. I was pleased as punch to see that they released a collection of realistic insect models consisting of a Chinese mantis, a Hercules beetle, and a blue morpho. I thought they were sold separately, so I spent a long time agonizing over which one to buy until I found out that all three came in a set!
Since these guys clock in at under 30 bucks per model, they're not particularly complex or difficult, but they still provide plenty of mental stimulation for an adult. I'm physically incapable of doing Legos in more than one sitting, so I finished all three of these over the span of an evening — around 4 hours with some distractions, give or take.
These are all made to scale, which is delightful. And the finished bugs are fully poseable! Bug legos: $80. Being able to hold your new little bug friends because you'll probably never get to do that in real life: Priceless.
Lamy's Dark Lilac release has caused a pretty significant stir lately, to the point that somehow it ended up getting a story on the New York Times. Granted, the Times publishes many stories that hardly qualify as news or factual information, but regardless, "limited edition fountain pen ink controversy makes it onto national news publication" is not something I had on my 2024 Bingo card.
Taking the ink of the hour for a spin in my journal
As with most internet controversies, I'm not sure how much of the controversy is real and how much of it is random people talking about controversy. (Now I'm one of those random people!)
The context is this: Dark Lilac was a wildly popular limited edition ink released in 2016. Lamy recently announced that they were going to add it to their permanent lineup, but with the caveat that the color would be different due to pigment sourcing issues. Goulet Pens has some comparison swatches.
I'm no chemist, but I am vaguely aware that pigment selection for products like makeup, soap, and (of course) ink is a pretty exact science because the pigment needs to play well with everything else that goes into the formulation. I'm not surprised that Lamy couldn't get an exact match for the original color, and I respect that they 1. disclosed that and 2. made the rerelease permanent instead of being sneaky about it.
I bought this new edition of Dark Lilac because I wasn't even using fountain pens when at the time of the first release, and I don't have any purple ink. Comparisons to the old edition aside, Dark Lilac 2.0 is great!
I love tiny palettes. They're the type of thing that I see and swear I'm going to do [x] (paint) more because I have [y] (a tiny paint palette). I thought really hard about getting a fancy small wooden palette (as seen in this tiny palette mega review by Leslie Stroz), but decided against it in favor of engineering one out of a mint tin. I also love putting random shit in mint tins. I already keep my small cross stitching projects in one (you would be shocked at the amount of embroidery floss you can stuff into one Altoids tin).
I don't think there is ever a good time to appropriate the word "refugee" when referring to something as petty as ex-users of [insert stupid social media website here], but if there was ever a bad time to do that, the bad time is now. And yet. Here we are.
By the way, here are some organizations with boots on the ground in Palestine:
