Wine and Paint

This past weekend I crossed another item off my 101 in 1001 list, #45 Take a wine and painting class, and it was so much fun!  I had mentioned to one of my coworkers a few weeks ago that there were quite a few things I wanted to cross off my list and she said she would like to take a wine and painting class too!   

In case you are not familiar there are evenings events hosted all over New York City (and I would guess other cities too) where you learn how to paint the featured canvas over a course of two hours while drinking copious amounts of wine.  Instead of a week night we decided to go at noon on Sunday so it would fit everyone’s schedule.

The tag line of Paint Nite is to Drink Creatively, which coming from someone who works in advertising, is quite a catchy tag line. I think if we had chosen an evening session we would have had a few glasses of wine but instead I enjoyed one glass of champagne over the course of our three hour class.  

The title of the piece of work we created was “Under the Red Tree” and was rated easy and I do have to say that was a bit of an understatement, I would definitely rate it medium skill level.  I had not painted since introduction to art my freshman year of high school so I had quite a bit of re-learning to do.  This is what we were supposed to be painting: 

One we saw the featured canvas we found our seats at Room 53, a piano bar and restaurant in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen.  We donned our green smocks and sat down to very blank  16”x20” canvases.  Armed with three brushes, which the instructor called papa, mama, and baby bear, and squirts of black, white, red, yellow, and blue acrylic paint we went to work.

I called the above step “Easter Egg” and the instructor got a good laugh. An hour into the class we took a break to let our colors dry before we started the next step and I decided I needed to switch from water to a glass of bubbly. 

And then back to painting. 

 The instructor mentioned that each person’s version of the tree would turn out differently but it was amazing to walk around the room and see 30 different variations of the same painting.  I did not realize until we were done that the hill the tree was supposed to be on and the green rolling hills in the background were left out on my painting and as one of my coworkers said, it looks like it is hanging out in the Ocean. Here is an example of the three of ours:

And finally me, with my finished painting: 

Wine and paint was so much fun, I highly recommend it!