[caption id="attachment_1856" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="portulaca bud"][/caption]
Portulaca or moss rose, which I grow in front of my house bordering the sidewalk, is one of my favorite flowers. I love watching the little buds grow. I love looking at the flowers in the middle of the day to see which one is in full bloom. They don’t need a lot of care, just weeding around them and sunlight.

Today’s Flowers is hosted by Luiz Santilli Jr. Thank you, Luiz!

Jill teaches art in Highland Park. Read Jill’s past posts.

For those of you who’ve painted in traditional oils, I’m sure you’re aware of the pros and cons of this medium. I’m very excited about the newer water soluble, sometimes called water miscible oil paints.

Some Pros of Traditional Oils:

Superior blend-ability and a rich, buttery texture.

Slow drying time allows you to return to your work hours or even days later.

A great variety of affects can be achieved with this beautiful and versatile medium. Techniques such as scumbling, glazing, palette knife painting and more can be utilized with beautiful results

Some Cons of Traditional Oils:

Some people have allergies, either to breathing the odor (one of my students had to stop oils and switch to watercolor because of her asthma) or allergies from having the paint touch the skin (gloves can be used).

Clean up of brushes, stains on clothes, floors, etc can be arduous and time consuming.

So now to my new love: water-soluble oils! Some companies have come out with this fantastic and relatively new medium. They have found a way to emulsify the linseed oil with water, so the paints my be thinned with water, without separating or losing brilliancy.

* “Recent advances in chemistry have produced modern water miscible oil paints that can be used with and cleaned up with water. Small alterations in the molecular structure of the oil creates this water miscible property.”

The clean up is fantastically easy and brushes clean effortlessly. I don’t recommend to anyone with severe allergies to linseed oil, but these paints are deemed more ecologically friendly and most are AP non-toxic approved.

That great blend-ability you get from traditional oils is still there. The seven paintings I’ve completed so far in this medium have dried with a lovely, oil rich sheen. Drying time is faster than traditional oils, but still far longer than acrylic paints. So you can usually return to the easel within 2 days (depending on the thickness of the paint) and still modify your work and blend. Definitly within the same day. I actually find the slightly faster drying time advantageous.

One note, this is a new technology, and although I have had no problem thus far with cracking or peeling we don’t know yet how they will stand the test of time. Oils have been around for centuries, although traditional oils notoriously crack and peel as well. In fact, they keep a lot of experts in the business of restoration.

Perhaps no medium is perfect. Acrylics have only been commercially available since the 1950s. A scary thought: what if they all start peeling away at the hundred year mark? Well, let’s hope for the best and trust in newer technologies to come along to find better ways to RESTORE art works.

In the meantime, I wish you a happy time creating!

* Wikipedia

Joe Settler writes:

We were in the park yesterday when one child, perhaps 6 or 7, was wildly swinging one of the toys in the park in a way that was extremely dangerous to anyone else playing or walking nearby.

My wife went over and nicely asked him to stop, explaining that what he was doing was very dangerous to the other children, especially the smaller children.

Instead of stopping, this little kid had the Chutzpah to say (and say it in a way that was extremely Chutzpadik) that the small kids shouldn’t play there, and he will keep doing swinging the toy however he likes. She should go to another other area.

Read the whole thing.

What do you think? How would you handle the child? Do you think a politician can help? How could a teacher help? Feel free to comment both here and on his post.

Thou shalt not do so unto the LORD thy God; for every abomination to the LORD, which He hateth, have they done unto their gods; for even their sons and their daughters do they burn in the fire to their gods.

Devarim (Deuteronomy) 12:31

It may be hard to imagine, but several thousand years ago people sacrificed their children on altars to gods. Here the Torah teaches us that is not right, not proper. We might think, how could anyone do such a thing, burn their children alive as a sacrifice, but there are archaeological findings that show this really did happen.

I read this while sitting in shul, listening to Parshat Re’eh, the Torah portion for the past week. And I spoke with a friend, an older friend who has had many experiences in life. She said that pasuk can be open to many interpretations, but she thinks of her friends whose children did not stay in the Jewish world, who married out. She feels they sacrificed their children. I think of this occurring today in a more concrete way, as unfortunately some children are taught at a very young age (5) to hate, to hold a gun, to kill, to blow themselves up and be a martyr and to kill as many Jews as possible in the process. See summer camp in Gaza.

I’m going to try to write something about the parsha each week, though that has proven to be a difficult task. Some weeks are so busy one can’t even think straight. Other weeks, I get a chance to look at the parsha, but I can’t find one particular theme that motivates me enough to write a post. I’ll keep working at this. It should get easier, one would think, the more years one tries to write about the parsha.

Oh, and Gila did a wonderful job on this week’s Haveil Havalim.

This past week we (my daughter, my middle son, and I) spent some time at Jill‘s. We all painted. Jill spent a lot of time with my daughter; this was her second art lesson with Jill. My middle son has been taking classes with Jill for about one year. I finally finished my broccoli painting (see my broccoli drawing), which I started months ago:

Here’s the ballerina that my daughter painted:

I finished my broccoli painting before my daughter finished hers, so I did this sketch:

This is my son’s artwork:

My son is excited about surrealism (Jill taught him about Salvador Dali).
What do you see in his painting?

• Juggling Frogs put up the 1st Edition of Carnival of Overdue Thanks.
• Mottel got Lost in the Alps with some campers and returned with great photos.
• Yehuda did Haveil Havalim #179.
• News Flash for Our Family: My daughter will also be exhibiting at the Highland Park Public Library in September, in addition to my paintings and my middle son’s and many more of Jill’s students work. And some of Jill’s too. I’ll post her ballerina painting on this blog soon.
  See a few of the paintings that will be exhibited.