Wine and Art

I can't remember if I have blogged about Groupon yet, but it is this amazing website. Normally, I like to sign up for those e-mails you get all the time from companies with supposed discounts and deals. But most of the time, I end up just deleting the e-mails before even opening them. Not Groupon. Groupon has a deal of the day but it is not on an item. It is on a service. Most of the ones we get for Indy are spa packages, theatre tickets, restaruant gift cards, etc. But you get them at a major discount. I highly recommend you go to this website Groupon and find your city. It is totally worth it. I have been using it to have an opportunity to try some pretty unique things at a discounted price.

For instance, last night, I and five other ladies went to a wine and canvas party. Here's the website for you locals: Wine and Canvas . Basically, you show up and you get a canvas and a bunch of paint. A local artist goes step by step and shows you how to paint a famous painting. They picked Starry Night by Van Gogh for this particular class. It was held at a restaurant where they had specials on wine and margaritas for our group. Perfect! So I sipped a margarita and documented my process. Please be kind with your opinions. I am, in no way, an artist. I only did this class b/c it was $17 and I thought it would be fun to do something new.

They had us draw the main objects in the painting with a pencil and then go over it with blue paint. This is the only point where my steeple actually looks like somewhat of a steeple. My houses got a little messed up, but oh well.

We moved onto the greens and started painting the grass. It was really interesting to see how these small strokes eventually became the painting. At this point, I was seeing a lot of white and not a lot of Van Gogh.

This is probably where I started to not like my painting. I thought I messed up on the sky's rhythm. It was a lot harder than you think to make things swirl. My brain wanted my hand to go one way with the stroke and it would go the complete opposite way. And now my steeple definitely looks like the Washington Monument.

PS There was a couple in the class from Norfolk, Va that I chatted with and turns out later I found out that Jacqueline, Kristen's sister, knew someone in my class. The girl also posted pictures of her painting and so we put two and two together. If only I had known during the class!

The masterpiece! I know its not exactly like Starry Night, but I'm calling this my interpretation of it. I was pretty impressed with myself though. Normally I draw stick figures. There is supposed to be more white in the sky, but the teacher was going so slow that I got bored and just did the sky the way I wanted to. Anyway, I just keep asking myself how long will Chris be able to hold back before he just has to hang this on the wall? I mean, this is probably going to end up in the Smithsonian. :-)