Recently, I took some steps to finally get “painting” off my bucket list of life skills to acquire. In March, I got a handful of Paint-Nite (now known as Yaymaker) coupons that must be used in 6 months, so I’d lose the $100 US if I didn’t use them, in other words. I also had a dozen or so online courses from the platform formerly known as Craftsy, before they were taken over by some other entity, on sale for about $10 each as “foundation theory”, when I had failed to actually take it up with the “doing” part. I was going to supplement the rest of what I’ll need to know with YouTube, online searches, networking with real painters, etc. All instead of spending almost twice as much for just one introductory post-secondary course (not including supplies) that would be the old-fashioned, or at least, traditional, way of learning! It would also be one that would get me far less knowledge and experience. Sure, it’d be less work on my part not to go do all this research, watch and read all this information, some of which isn’t the best, go find people to make friends with to be my “consultants”, etc. However, that just wouldn’t be me… or the innovating and resourceful millennial, for that matter… though I want to be absolutely clear I’m no millennial! You can always take the best of any group and incorporate it into your life to improve it, right?

Forward to the past few weeks and I finally got out to my first Paint Nite, where we painted a slightly challenging scene called Heron Pointe! The results are below. It’s plural because initially, I improvised for some fun to make a Death Star instead of a moon in my painting, when the instructor said something about how the wrong technique resulted in a blotch and “that’s no moon” (same quote by Obi-wan Kenobi from Star Wars). The Death Star looked terrible because the instructor taught us how to paint a moon, not a Death Star, and I’m no prodigy lol.

Upon seeing my output, and reconsidering it, I realized that to give this painting to anyone, whether my Parents or whoever may take it from in the laundry room where I may leave it as I run out of wall space with future paintings, there was going to be a seriously limited audience who might take the painting. As a result, after a recent Paint Nite where we learned to paint a moon (upcoming post), I fixed the Death Star in my painting to be the moon shown below. Flip through the collage to see the full painting. The moon’s not great, but it is far better than the Death Star, and someone might actually want to take this painting off my hand one day. 🙂

More of my painting adventures to come in the future!