For Mother's Day, I bought my mom a ticket to a guided paint class. You may remember that I recently attended one of these classes with some of my friends. Now, I know Mother's Day was, like, forever ago, but we just attended our class last Thursday. And Beth and Erin joined us too, making it the perfect girls' night out. Since I had already painted the three trees scene that was being painted that night, I decided to take a stab at freestyle painting. Here I am with my (almost) blank slate.

Mom and Erin followed along with the three trees scene and got right to work painting their backgrounds.

Beth went with the freestyle option too.

She worked on a "drippy" masterpiece. Here it is after the first application of drippy paint.

After taking a step back, was she feeling good about her decision? I think so.

Mom and Erin listened carefully as they were given their next steps.

At this point in the evening, my canvas look like this. Uh, not so good.

I still didn't really know where I was going with it. Beth's drips were making a lot of headway. She went all the way across the top with the yellow, and began adding a little red.

Mom and Erin began layering colors on their background. Erin, the real artist, had all kinds of fancy techniques up her sleeves.

Mom blended different shades of blue.

Beth's painting started getting real drippy.

Finally, I was starting to make a little headway in a good direction. The bottom half of my canvas was taking shape, even though I still wasn't sure what to do with the top.

Mom flipped her canvas upside down to work on the ground of her trees scene.

I must've gotten really into my painting because my step-by-step pictures stop here. When I picked the camera back up, Beth's drippy painting had some new circles. Pretty cool, huh?

My favorite part is the two red circles down in the corner.

Feeling pretty good about it, Beth decided to take a seat and watch the rest of us.

I have zero photos that show the progress of what I did to the top half of my painting. First, I realized that bright teal color had to go and started covering it with more of a sky blue. Then I slapped on some white and tried to blend it in. A dab of yellow and a touch of grey later, and I ended up with this.

Here's the finished product with my camera flash on.

Here I am with my finished masterpiece. It's a little blurry, but when the flash was on the light reflected off the painting.

Mom's and Erin's trees were really beginning to look good. Here's Erin layering on the texture medium.

Mom's finished trees. Her colors look really good with the colors in my painting. I have a feeling our paintings might end up living at the beach house.

Erin's masterpiece. Love how she did her shading.

I guess I didn't take a finished photo of Beth's painting. Beth cracked me up - she "finished" hers about 6 different times during the class. But then she'd find some glaze or a texture medium or something and pick her brush back up and keep going. I guess you can't say your painting's done until you're walking out the door with it!

We took a group photo with our paintings before leaving for the night. I think we're a pretty talented bunch!