Paint Night Date Night

First I want to apologize for the lack of posts lately. There’s been a very big thing going on that I’ll write about later – probably in December once everything is sorted out. Meanwhile I’ve been unexpectedly busy and am about a month behind on my posts.

This is a fun night John and I had together in Tucson back in the beginning of October. It’s a painting class! And it was surprisingly easy (as long as you weren’t overly critical of your own work). The instructor told us what to do, step by step, and it somehow worked out!

This is one of the few times (or only time?) I’ve been indoors with strangers without masks since the start of the pandemic. The flier had said the class would be out on the patio, but it wasn’t after all. I guess we could have put on masks once we realized it was being held indoors, but we must not have thought of it, or not felt it was necessary. There were only a few of us in the room.

We’re using acrylic paints. I’ve only painted once or twice before in my life and I’ve always used watercolors. Turns out acrylics are vastly easier than watercolors! With acrylics if it doesn’t look right, you can just paint right over top of it again. As many times as you want!

With watercolors if you don’t like it, you just gotta learn to like it. You get one shot and that’s it. And with watercolors you never know what you’re going to get. They run all funny on the paper in varying intensities, lolling around in all different directions muddying up the other colors. Acrylics just go where you put them.

Here’s the start of mine vs. the start of John’s. It was fun how we were doing the same painting but each one turned out differently.

With watercolors you have to leave white space for everything else you want to add to the picture. You have to have everything figured out ahead of time. But with acrylics, you just paint right over top the background however you feel like!

John and I chose different colors for the pickup truck and the pumpkins in the foreground.

Here’s the paintings done by the couple sitting across from us. It was interesting to see how they all varied.

This little guy is blow drying his painting so he can add more paint.

He was really globbing the paint on with confidence, so it was taking longer for his to dry. His mom gave me permission to take the picture, but in the ensuing month I’ve forgotten his name. Look at that expression, lol, clearly a future heartbreaker. And great painting! Check out the pink worms on the pavement!

Ta-da! It’s not fine art, but we decided they were good enough to hang during October as part of our seasonal Halloween decorations.

And it was great fun!

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