Girls Night Out

“Life is a blank canvas, and you need to throw all the paint on it you can.”

- Danny Kaye



 

 

I am going to start with the fun from the weekend because it is Monday and I'm at work staring down another 5 days without my son and I need a little fun. Unfortunately I only have a couple pictures to share because I don't like posting pictures with other people on the internet (except the hubs or with permission) so you will just have to take my word for the fact that I wasn't all alone :)

 

Lets set the stage: a stormy Saturday night. Five women set loose from their spouses/significant others and children with money in their pockets and stress on their mind. Empty stomachs all around. A pizza shop called the Mellow Mushroom.

 

The five of us (4 from my work and 1 from the hubby's) met up for dinner just after 5pm. It really was raining pretty hard, but we all arrived in good spirits ready to have some fun. The only rule was no/limited work talk which we stuck to pretty well. We laughed, we ate, we talked about life and hobbies and spouses/significant others (in mostly good ways :) It was fun, but we had other places to get to and were on a little time crunch

 

Moving on: same five women, same night only now the rain has stopped. Cut to a small shop down the street full of paint. Paint? Yup, paint. Its called the Cabernet Canvas and soon the whole place will be filled with people making creativity history. Ok, maybe not history, but having a lot of fun anyway.

 

We walked in pretty clueless and all a little giddy even without alcohol involved and picked our stools. Unfortunately, we quickly learned that our choice of seats wasn't the best, but in the end it didn't matter. We grabbed our paper plate pallet and set it up with paint to match the sample - red, white, blue, black, yellow and green acrylic paint. We each had one large paintbrush and one smaller round paintbrush as well as a cup of water and a paper towel. And a completely blank, white canvas.

 

The teacher for the night (not an exceptionally friendly or outgoing woman and she was a little disappointing since she only ever moved one time and it was to give bad advice to one of us) sat up front with one finished painting for reference and one blank canvas of her own. Once it was time to start she informed us all to make pink (by mixing red and white together if you weren't aware of that already from kindergarten, which by the way the hubby was not when I asked him later that night) paint to paint the entire background. We all did with various different shades...hues...I don't know the difference between them. Then we literally sat and watched paint dry and complimented each other on such a great job.

 

Next up was painting in a white moon and two white owl eyes followed by a blue body, wings and a tree. This is where we learned that sitting to the left of an artist who is right handed doesn't allow for much real time visualization of the painting that was occurring. We all did, some too low on the canvas, some too high, some too far to the left (me) and so on. While the process is fairly idiot proof, you can still muck it up if you try hard enough. We kept plugging along, complimenting and making fun of each other and ourselves in turn and trying to stay caught up and not frustrated with our own lack of inherent artistic ability.

 

Work in progress

 

I had been pretty happy with mine until the tree when I realized I had placed my owl too far to the left leaving little room for the tree branches. It turned out ok in the end though. Next up was adding curly cue twigs to the tree. This was the downfall for most of us. The small brush we were given was pretty worn out. You couldn't make anything a fine line and I needed a fine line. The one woman in our group said that next time she is bringing her own brush! I fudged my way through it though.

 

We eventually began to add in the head, tail and feet as well as the rest of the eyes which was the last thing we did.  It took 2.5 hours to do the entire painting and in the end none of our looked like the reference painting, the teachers, or each others but they all turned out fantastic!

 

My Funky Owl Painting

 

I believe we all had a ton of fun and we left saying that we would have to do it again soon. The place has the calendar up through the end of October with some nice looking Halloween prints in there. It is only $35 too which is a steal I think. I can't wait to go back!!!!