Canvas Fun!

Boy, do I have a LOT of work to get back on track in 2015! My poor neglected blog is just one of the things I intend to shore up. Over winter break, my daughter pointed out to me how I keep promising post more often...but fail to follow through. I know, I know, and I do have really good excuses. But my blog is important to me, and I haven't been giving it the priority it deserves on my list! This year, I resolve to do better.

So back to the topic of today's post! Bailey suggested that we go to a wine and canvas class over break. They're hugely popular around here! Due to our schedule, we ended up taking an "all ages" class with no wine, but we decided that was probably a good thing! Wine might have adversely affected the quality of our work! :)

As you can see by this picture, the studio has held lots of painting classes. These are just a few of the many class paintings on display.

Here we are before the class, all ready to go. Although I'm looking a little crazed...

Our class project was called "Snowy Owl", and is shown in the photo below. We decided that the eyes and eyebrows could make or break this project. Get them wrong, and your friendly owl could easily become evil! So I decided to tone down the eyebrows and Bailey left the rings off of her eyes. Otherwise, we tried to follow the sample as best we could!

I will say that the good thing about acrylic paint is that you can easily correct mistakes. And I certainly corrected a lot of them throughout the class!

The first step was to squirt paint on paper plates. That went pretty well! Then the instructor had us paint the canvas gray. You can see that my sky (at left) was quite a bit lighter than the sample...not intentionally! Bailey's sky looked much better than mine.

Next we painted the tree at the left with the branch for the owl to sit on. After that, we had to figure out where the eyes would go so that there was room for the owl. That was quite stressful for me! We painted the eyes with a big round sponge on a handle.

Here is my owl before I added his totally weird looking feet! He looks like an egg balancing on a stick!

Oh, here you can see the big sponge we used for the eyes! Intimidating! And look at my messy paper plate! We tried to share colors but Bailey told me I was too messy for her!

Another scary part came when we added feathers to the wings shown below. YIKES! And the tummy area of the owl was also difficult for me. At one point my owl looked like he was wearing a bib. I painted over it several times! And look at my weird toes gripping the branch! I will say that it is difficult to paint when you are laughing so hard!

The scariest part of all was adding the rings around the eyes with permanent paint pen. I decided I wasn't handy enough with a paint brush to paint the rings, but the pen was not easy to handle on the canvas surface either. My rings ended up too small, but there was no going back at that point!

Here's Bailey painting the sides of her canvas.

And her project turned out great! We decided that hers is more of a "nighttime owl" and mine is more of a "snowy owl" canvas. Her small white dots look like stars, and my large white blobs look like...well, large white blobs. :)

It was a very fun afternoon, and we left with two finished projects! Bailey plans to hang her canvas in her new apartment. I just shipped it to her today!