Last Wednesday night, I met up with some friends - Mary Elizabeth, Meghan, and Stephanie - to enjoy a night of painting together. I don't remember how we found out about this, but we immediately signed up for it. I was veeerrrry excited a) for a night out with the girls, b) because I love all things crafty, and c) because I was kinda curious to see how a real artist painted a canvas. The class was very relaxed - we were able to bring wine and snacks to have throughout the night. So maybe the "starving" part of my title to this post isn't necessarily true...

After snacking for a bit, it was time to get to work! We started by painting the background orange.

Don't forget to get the edges!

Our next step was to paint randomly sized and spaced white circles and then outline them in blue (or red, in my case). Then came the tricky part - attempting to paint two straight-ish lines across the top. Our teacher showed us how to use our paint brush to mark it off before we painted it.

And while we had our little paint brush out, we also outlined our circle flowers.

Steph wasn't so sure about this part...

And Mary let the instructor take over while she had more wine. (We discovered that more wine = better looking painting.)

This was probably about the time I dropped my paint brush and it rolled all the way down my canvas.

The last step was to add birds to our wire. We were pretty nervous about those birds. I mean, you can't really mess up flowers. They can be any shape you want. But birds? Well, they should probably look like birds. The instructor told us we could just freehand them OR she had some stencils if we wanted them. Yesssss! We cheated - no free-handed birds for us.

After a few last finishing touches, all we had left to do was let them dry!

Ta daaa! Our finished masterpieces. So similar, yet so different.

I, personally, can't wait to go back again. Anyone want to come with me?