Space Turtle!

Have you ever done one of those 'Drink and Paint' classes? It's the new trend to go to a studio, have a couple of glasses of wine, and have an instructor walk you through a step by step canvas painting. I've always wanted to try one, but I either didn't like the painting subject or couldn't herd my friends into an organized group to try it.

I mean, it wasn't something I was losing sleep over, but it seemed like a fun thing to try. It probably would have never happened until the opportunity was thrust upon me. My sister found a 'Paint Your Patronus' paint party and strong-armed my mom and I into signing up with her. As much as I wanted to try one of these classes, I had some concerns. First, I'm not a big 'Harry Potter' fan. I couldn't care less about my patronus. Secondly, I don't drink so I was conscious of wasting money if drinks were included. And lastly, my mom is an artist. A professional, awesome artist. You can see her work here. My sister inherited the artistic gene from our mother and I got the engineering gene from our father. I didn't want my sister and my mom's paintings to be amazing and awesome and mine just be crap.

But I was signed up, so I picked a patronus, clearly Turtle, and sent a picture of him in to be sketched out in advance.

Typically, these sorts of events happen in a proper painting studio, but this one-off happened in a bar downtown. The other difference between this patronus event and normal events is that everyone had a different painting, a different patronus. Typically at these paint parties, everyone is painting the same sunset or the same tree with little heart leaves. But you really couldn't expect everyone to have the same patronus, right? There were a lot of deer, rabbits, and owls, but I had the only tortoise and one woman had a glass of wine.

It was a fun event, but it was definitely chaotic. Fortunately, each canvas had their patronus pre-sketched onto it so we had some guidelines. Without that, mine would have been a complete mess.

The bar wasn't set up well for the event and I couldn't see any of the sample painting as we went through the steps. It became a weird sort of telephone game of interpreting what I was supposed to do by words only. 'Paint wavy lines starting at your patronus' became 'a background of wavy lines', not what it was supposed to be, smoke coming off the patronus. I didn't have a clue what I was doing most of the time, but that didn't stop me. In hindsight, a tortoise shell had way too many details on it to fit into the painting techniques we were being walked through. My Turtle painting is definitely more 'Space Turtle' than 'Patronus', but I think I like it better that way. Like something from Terry Pratchett, he drifts slowly through space, watching over the galaxy.

And speaking of watching over, I hung him in front of the toilet in the guest room, so he can watch over and judge anyone using the bathroom.

In the future, I'd still like to try a class where we all paint the same thing. My next masterpiece won't be as close to my heart as my Space Turtle, but maybe it will be more along my skill set.

If you are in the Tucson area and would like to try one of these classes, check out Tipsy Picasso.