Looking at Wine and Canvas

I went to a Wine and Canvas event last Thursday with saintvi. We had struggled to find a date and time and acceptable painting after juggling schedules and most importantly having our last painting event cancelled! The painting below is the professional example that we were emulating.  It was titled “In the Forest”. Our painting instructor was a young man named Cody. He was friendly and a little eccentric in appearance. I didn’t mind all the tattoos, and I could overlook the giant ear gauges. But the “man-bun” was making me have thoughts about scissors!

We started with a blank canvas and proceeded to put the first “layer” on. This consisted of a horizon line followed by lots of white paint on the top half of the canvas. We mixed very light purple and put in our ghostly trees and the impression of leaves and underbrush.

The next step was to add the next layer consisting of darker trees using eggplant toned paint (purple, black, and a hint of yellow). This is where it got a little hairy. We were assured that nearly all the light purple trees would be covered up so if we made a mistake no one would be able to tell! The darker trees were going to really stand out.

We had to take a break to let things dry a bit before tackling the next step.  Our next challenge was painting the water. It required a base layer of white paint with thin lines of light blue and light purple. Everything was to go on in a horizontal direction. That sounds easier than it is!

We took another break. It was crazy that we had so many breaks – usually there is one, we had three! But the water we had painted needed to dry a little. The next step was to add the shrubbery and some detail to the water. The water detail consisted of very thin black lines. It was wicked hard to do. Some people opted to skip that part since Cody gave everyone the option! Being detail oriented, I gave it my best effort.

Our next effort was to use the black paint. We were instructed to paint using straight black. It was terrifying. First we indicated the borders of the stream using a thin black line. Then we slapped black paint on to fill in the lines. At this point we were about 10 minutes before the end of the event. Cody started to really push us to finish! We had to put in some black trees and add black shrubbery.

As time ran out we started putting leaves on trees. I thought it was probably the easiest thing we did all night! Then we had to paint in the flowers. That part was agonizing. It was hard to see what Cody was doing because he stood directly in front of his canvas. I gave it my best shot relying heavily on the demonstration print to figure out where thing were supposed to go!

I was able to sign my canvas with my little mouse. It was in keeping with the difficulty of the painting – I had to sign it upside down! I’m starting to like it more as time goes on. I thought that saintvi’s (Melinda) stream was much better than mine. She went off script and put pink and green into her water!

Although we didn’t finish until almost 9:45 PM I think our paintings look pretty darn good!