Paint Party 3

I have been to three Madhatter paint parties. You can read about my first class and what a Madhatter paint party is  HERE . The most recent one I attended, I believe was my favorite one so far. We painted a cubism style picture of wine bottles. We had alot of fun. It was a pretty small class this time of only five of us and the two art instructors..

I love to do pencil drawings but Im getting used this painting on canvas thing pretty quick.

The first thing we did was drew a rough sketch of our painting. We normally do not draw the picture first, we just paint it but with this style of painting it was easier.


Eat a cookie, sip a drink....then ....


Eat a another cookie, sip some more....then


Its finally looking like something.

Ya known, when you get several girls in a room painting, you get alot of silly stuff.
While everyone is busy painting, we tell stories, talk about songs, things going on around us and joke around. You may even learn a new word or two like, "swirly dizzle" or dibble dabble".  I even learned what a Tangent was. I also learned that when someone is asked to paint a "woody" they mean a style of car. Ha!

Wah Lah!
My painting is complete.

I'm no Picasso but it goes pretty good in my kitchen along with all my vineyard and fat chef decor so I'm ok with it...all except the black mark on the left hand side where I dropped my brush on it at the end. pfpffhh.

It's Work Until It's Art

My plan is to not talk about work on this blog, that's why its called life away from the office chair. But I did a project for the company I work for and just had to write about it. I mean, really, Its not considered work when its actually an art like project. And after all, I did do this at home.

The company needed a new sign. It was looking really bad. It was short and the bushes have grown too tall for anyone to see it from the road. I was going to redo it but it was too rotten, so I volunteered to make a new sign from scratch. Little did I know this would be a pretty big project to do. I didn't mind though. I love to paint.



The first thing I did was went to the local hardware store for some lumber and then picked out the perfect "yellow"paint, and some brushes.


Thanks to my wonderful husband, he handled picking out the right kind of wood to use and cut it to down to the size I needed. Then I painted it with a few coats of the yellow paint. I wanted to make sure the paint was on good enough to make a good seal. I used the old sign to trace the letters onto paper then cut them out to make a stencil. that was really hard considering I could barely see through the paper to trace. A lot was guessed at and therefore, really, there are different shapes to the letters than the original, but hey, its my design now right?


Anyone that knows me, knows that I have zero patience and I'm surprised I didn't cut my finger off during this process. My daughter was just itching to help so I let her trace some to the letters onto the wood from the stencil once I had them cut out.

Now Its time to paint the letters! Being a lefty, I have to paint right to left so my hand does not smear the paint. Just another obstacles I've had to deal with all my life. If your left handed, you know what I mean.


This is scary! I'm giving myself  ZERO confidence at this point and wondering what in the world have I gotten myself into. I carefully and tediously painted on the letters and the boarder. I was really afraid of messing it up. One wrong mark and its ruined. However, it does have imperfections, but from the view of a passerby, they may never notice.


Wah Lah!. Its finally finished.

The boss seemed to liked it. Can you say 'brownie points"?
I want to also give thanks to the mechanic here at the company for making a taller signpost and hanging it for me. I'm sure that was a job in itself too.