BYOB Painting!

A few years ago I went to a BYOB painting class and found it to be a lot of fun! You get to paint a pretty picture while drinking wine and hanging out with friends. Three things that are all very fun! At these things, you have an instructor who gives you step-by-step directions to create the painting for that night. So when a Groupon came along for Artistic Abandon, one of the many BYOB painting places to pop up these days, my friends Kia, Kat, and I all bought it and went about selecting our painting from their calendar. 

The problem I have with a lot of the paintings at these places is that they're very...not my style, to put it nicely. But we did find one that would be really nice, and seemed like it would be fairly simple. Now, I am most certainly not an artist, nor will I ever pretend to be. But I also own that, and am willing to show my....not so perfect results. And as a part of this, I am willing to also show you what my painting was intended to look like:

It's mostly splotches...so it really did seem like it would be easy. Not so much. As it turns out, this is one of their hardest 2 hour class paintings. They really should provide warnings, but I went in knowing my painting wouldn't turn out perfect, and it was all about the fun!

I did take my step-by-step pictures, so I'll show you the process!

We drew our horizon line, tree lines, and tree lines for the water portion. We then filled in the sunset sky.

We then started splotching on the trees using red, blue, purple, green, yellow, and some white. Splotches are hard. You don't want to keep them all in a line, you want to do them all over...but the problem I was running into were that my splotches were either too intense, too long, or too....not right.

Kat and Kia hard at work!

 Filling in the second side of trees. Still looks weird to me.

Now, the three splotches were up and down, but the water proved to be much easier because you do those strokes straight across. Which also means longer strokes look better too! You wanted to try to match the colors to the trees too so that it looked like a legit reflection.

My final product! Yea, it's not perfect in the slightest. And I'm not 100% sure if and where I"ll hang it. But frankly, it was a lot of fun, so paying for the entertainment of it was totally worth it, even if the final product isn't amazing.

The three of us and our paintings!

Finishing drying!

I will say, Artistic Abandon has quite a few others I'm interested in doing. And I would probably be willing to pay the full price to do certain ones too....but hopefully another Groupon will come along. Even though the final product wasn't perfect, it was still a great time, and you get to be somewhat creative. I highly recommend you go and check one out if there's one in your town!