We have a great niece in Colorado who is an artist and an art teacher (as well as a wife and mother to small children). She also (because her life just isn’t busy enough, I guess) teaches wine and painting events. The pictures she posts on Facebook of those “painting parties” have always made me wish that I lived close enough that I could participate in one of those. It just looked like so much fun.
Soooo, unbeknownst to me, there are now events like that here, and my friend Candy invited me to one last Thursday evening.
Here are some pictures (some blurry for some inexplicable reason):
Apparently they have figured out that when you have a group of inexperienced painters slinging paint around, it’s wise to give them aprons to wear that cover most of their clothes. (That really is an apron, even though there is so much of it that it has wrapped around Candy so that it looks like it might be coveralls!)
The name of the event is “Wine and Canvas” but in reality it’s a little hard to savor a glass of wine (at least for me) while you are trying to put paint on a canvas that actually looks like something! So there were drinks and appetizers before we started.
We were seated pretty close to each other at the tables. (Notice Candy showing off, holding her paint pallet like an old pro.)
When we arrived I noticed that our plates of paints were under our canvas. (Shown from the back) So, I wondered out loud to Candy how we were going to get to the paints while we were painting because there obviously wasn’t space to put them beside the easel — and you couldn’t reach them where they were. She said we would be holding the plate in one hand and the brush in the other. Oh, yeah. Have I mentioned that it has been years and years since I have had an art class? Let me just say, enough years that I was definitely a “rookie” at this event. Thank goodness, Candy knew more about what we were doing than I did.
When I first saw the painting we were going to do I thought, “There is no way I will be able to paint that wine glass!” But the instructor had it all figured out, patiently instructing us to use a paint brush as a measure (full brush length, half brush length, etc.) and plotting dots on the canvas that we could then use to “connect the dots”.
It worked!
But this is when we began to see that each picture is unique, even though we had all followed the same instructions.
Candy said our glasses looked like one for white wine and one for red. My take on that was that mine looked a little more like a beer stein. But I was thrilled with it. Here, we were waiting for the instructor to tell us the next step.
One of the hardest parts of the project was keeping my paint colors separate, except when I wanted to mix them. Soon after we started, I looked down and my black paint had made a straight line to his next-door-neighbor the yellow.
It’s good that we finished when we did, because I had totally lost control of my paints!
And, by the way, all the paint didn’t make it to the canvas.
But in the end, considering everything I didn’t know and did do wrong, I was happy with my painting.
Here are our finished paintings.
I find it really interesting to look at a whole group of the pictures and how each one is different. I suppose that is the reason these events have become so popular.
I can’t wait for the next time!