Chipped Painting and Dragon Wood Burning

By Elissa Rosenthal

Hello Everyone! Thank you for coming to read my blog! I do appreciate it! If you enjoy my writing and want to know more about what I am doing, including staying up to date on this blog, my social media links will be down below.

For this week in my art journey, something unfortunate happened. If you have been reading this blog you know I have been waiting for the first stage of my oil painting to dry. Well, it did finally get dry, however, one of the people I live with ended up "bumping" into it. So now all the paint layers are breaking off in chips and the whole painting is now done for. This as well happened to be the day I finally received my walnut oil.

The image on the left is from the center of the painting, the one on the right is from the side.

Now, not to be too discouraged because of this mishap, I decided to try out some wood burning. I have had this wood burning kit around for the past few years, and have done nothing with it until now, so I figured I would give it a go. I did one wood burning quite a few years ago and it did not turn out too bad, which is why I originally bought the kit. 

This kit however, I would not ,so far, recommend. It is a good wood burner for the amount of money I paid for it, but it is by no means the best. The temperature has some consistency problems, the cord is short enough between the wood burner handle and the dial for the temperature to where it is easily turned by accident, and the tip kept on trying to unscrew it'self from the handle, making it where I had to get pliers to re-screw the hot tip several times.

Mind you I do not have much experience with wood burning, so these may be normal issues, but I do remember the last wood burner I used at my High School being a lot easier to use. Though, that wood burner was a much higher quality one, and obviously more expensive. 

This wood burning took me around seven hours to complete. The wood burner I used is called the Creative Versa-Tool by Walnut Hollow. Though, remember I did get this wood burner quite a few years ago. So for all I know the issues I am facing have to do with the age of the device or it not being used for years. 

To create the head and body I used several circles of differing sizes, a picture of which is available on my new Instagram account, under the name theelissapost . I originally thought of having the dragon reading, but the size between the book and the flowers seemed too off for me. So, instead I decided on a dandelion seed. The scales I did with the side of the wood burning tip. During the whole wood burning I used the standard tip in the wood burning kit.  

While wood burning I recommend having a fan going, and taking breaks. As of right now my throat is scratchy and my allergies have been acting up from the smoke created from wood burning for hours yesterday. Take care of your body while creating art. I will only do wood burning now with a fan and for stretches no longer than, perhaps, two hours.  

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Drying Oil and Finishing Knitting

By Elissa Rosenthal

Hello Everyone! Welcome to my blog! If you're new and enjoy my content, feel free to follow me on my social media. Instructions and links for my social media are at the end of this post.

For this week I checked up on my oil painting, and it is still drying. The good news however, is the white paint is drying in patches so hopefully by next week it will be dry.

Along with checking up on my unfinished oil painting, I decided to finish my knitting I have been working on for a few months. It was originally going to be a winter holiday present for my grandmother, until I realized how long the whole process was going to take. Now, I will be giving it to her sometime this weekend.

This is the first shawl I have knitted. It is made with twenty-one squares arranged as a three by seven. Now, I am not the best at knitting but, if you want to see more of my knitting projects please comment below.

Thank you for reading my blog I really do appreciate it! Please look at my other articles on this blog, share this blog, and if you want to know more about what I am doing follow me on my social media.

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The Good The Bad and The Oily

By Elissa Rosenthal

Hi Everyone! My name is Elissa, and welcome to my blog! If you're new, you can find the instructions to follow me on here and on my social media at the bottom of this post.

Now, this week in my art journey has had some highs and lows. Let's start with the lows first, and then we can end on a high note.

If you read my last blog post HERE , you'll know I started to work on an old painting of mine. Well, since then I've found out olive oil is NOT the best natural medium to use for oil painting. Currently, some of my painting is dry, however, the white is still as wet as it was the first day I painted it. So, I did a little research in artist forums and found out that olive oil is not considered a drying oil. This probably would have been good to know before painting with it, but we all make mistakes. So, I'm going to let it try to dry for the next few weeks and hopefully the parts with olive oil do eventually dry. If not, I may have to find a way to salvage some of my work on the canvas.

As it so turns out walnut oil is a better alternative, or so say the forums. So, I'm going to be saving up for some, so I can use that instead for the rest of my painting.

Onto the better news! I found out this one really cool guys' YouTube channel. He's an artist, and if people send him art supplies sometimes he makes a video of him using them. You can find his YouTube channel HERE under the username Peter Draws.

I was really inspired by his art videos and his style of drawing. So, I tried my hand at doing a doodle drawing in a more abstract style. It was really fun to do, though time consuming. You really don't understand how long detailed abstract drawings can take until you try to do them yourself.

This doodle took around four hours and was done using Faber-Castell pens. I was using the sizes SB and M. 

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Laying Down Paint : Unfinished Projects

By Elissa Rosenthal

 Hello, everyone! This week I've been working on that unfinished painting I showed you from last week. It is oil paint, though, so in order for me to get the look and kind of detail I want, I will have to wait a while to do the part of Aphrodite, and even longer to do more detailing.

I realized when I was mixing some of my paints, that I stated something incorrectly last week about what type of paint I used as the original background. This, on its own, made me realize more on why I stopped the painting on this canvas back then. I now remember that I was trying out, for giggles, to mix acrylic and oil paint. There is probably some way to properly do this, however, given my lack of experience doing so, it ended up just making it where there was a lot of paint put on the canvas unnecessarily.

Now, this doesn't mean I didn't use quite a bit of paint in my first attempt to salvage this canvas, I did, though I doubt as much as the first time. Luckily, though, I believe I've been able to keep the paint I used for my depiction of Venus in case it needs more detailing. The paint I used for the dolphins, however, ended up becoming more and more muddy, so I had no other choice than to throw it out.

Pallet for Venus

Pallet for dolphins

During the whole painting process, particularly for this part, I mostly focused on larger shapes and values and blocking them in. This is my first time trying to finish an oil painting so I'm quite happy with how it's turning out so far. Not to say I can't do better in the future, I'm sure with practice I can, but it is a good start. One of my main fears right now is not allowing enough time for the paint to dry completely, so, if it doesn't seem completely dry by next weekend I will be doing something else for that posting. For my medium, I just decided to use olive oil. I know it's not a traditional thing to do, to use regular oil as your medium versus using a labeled medium from the store. I've used traditional medium from the store before, however, my current space does not have enough ventilation for it, I have roommates who don't enjoy the smell, and so far using oil seems to work. I will state, though, using olive oil seems to work a lot better than using sesame seed oil, less smell too.

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