Painting with a Twist

Saturday evening I finally fulfilled an item on my bucket list and went to Painting with a Twist. I have been wanting to do this for about a year now. The premise is that you pay a fee for a class and they supply your canvas, paints and brushes. Each class is one designated painting (so you choose the class you do based on the painting you want to create) and the instructor walks you through the process step by step to recreate your own version of the piece.

I snapped this pictures pretty early on in the process so I could capture my masterpiece as it unfolded. It was very simple to follow the instructor, and the great thing is that each person is going to have a slightly different interpretation of what we were doing.

As the night progressed I figured out pretty quickly that this is something I will most definitely be doing again. It was fun, and the further into the piece we got the more I wanted to paint. I think I spent most of our break times working on my canvas rather than taking a break.

Mandy and another friend, Teresa, went with me. Mandy snapped this one of me hard at work. This was actually the first time I had painted a canvas on an easel. I don't own an easel so the few times I've painted something on canvas I've just done it laying flat on a table. I liked using the easel a lot, but when it came to really fine details I felt more comfortable picking it up so I could paint the way I draw. I wasn't the only one.

So this is my finished piece, well as finished as it was the night I came home from the class. I actually took some time the other day to complete it further and added some more leaves and highlighted my trees some more. See the little heart? It has an N and a B in it, and I wasn't really able to make that very clear at the class because they didn't supply us with a tiny brush so I had to fix that at home too.

We had a ton of fun. Here is Teresa, me and Mandy with our artwork. See how each of ours is unique while still being the same? I think we all did a really good job. It was my and Mandy's first time, and Teresa's third or fourth. Watch out, Michealangelo.