Week 24: Painting Class

I used to love to draw when I was younger. My sister and I took a series of drawing classes from our local community center when we were in middle or elementary school – I can’t exactly remember. I’ve only painted on a canvas a few times in my life, but have never actually attended a painting class.

Which is why I leapt out of my seat when I got my daily Groupon e-mail a few weeks ago. $40 for two people to attend the Bottles & Paint class at an art gallery in Mesa. Painting and wine… sounds like a great time to me! Now he’s charging $50 per person for the class, so that was a pretty good purchase.

The gallery closes down for the evening and the owner offers painting classes after hours, from 7-9 p.m. every weekend. Downtown Mesa is really cute and I would definitely like to come back during normal business hours.

When the class started, everyone grabbed their seats, cups of wine in hand, unsure of what was going to happen. We each had a print out of a trio of tulips for us to use as inspiration or guidelines when painting our own images. He had a small stock of photos to choose from to copy for those of us who weren’t interested in the tulips, but I wasn’t really feeling anything else.

First he gave us the option of drawing our own flowers or he would do it for us. I seized the opportunity and drew my own and also J.D.’s. I think I should also point out that it was around this time the group of women in front of us really started getting rowdy. We assume they had been pre-partying prior to the class. They were a group of four on a girls’ night out, about our parents’ ages. And the rest of the night started to get hysterical. Our old hippie instructor was loving it.

Once the drawings were on the canvas, we set to work on painting in the background. I started doing blotches of red paint and then mixed in another layer of orange on top. When the background was complete, we were told to get to work on the leaves and then finally the petals. The goal was to get the base colors down first, then accent later.

It was a blast! About an hour into the class he told us to get up and explore the gallery, because the eyes need to focus on something else before finishing the painting.

It was a really cute little gallery and we now have coupons for purchasing any of his pieces, or coming back for another class in the future.

I’m sold! I had a blast and I definitely want to paint some more. I loved everything about this experience and now we have two decent sized canvases to hang on the wall.

We all took individual and group shots for the gallery’s Facebook page… Our artist didn’t quite know how to use a cell phone… this was the fourth photo attempt he tried on my iPhone haha. Oh well, it was a blast! I’d recommend checking to see if anything like this is offered near you.