Week Six: Cooperative Canvas Painting

Since Dan and I switched weeks the past two weeks, I now had two weeks in a row that I planned and this week was our painting class that was cancelled two weeks ago. I'd been looking forward to this for a while now. This was a cooperative painting class at Lo's Galleria in New Haven. Basically the instructor teaches us how to paint a painting that she has already done. Here is the painting that the instructor did. This is also the painting that was linked to the class, so I knew that we would be coming home with something similar to this... which I thought would look great over our fireplace!

There were two other couples in the class and one girl on her own. One of the other couples ended up being the owners of the gallery. They told up shortly after we got there that they were going to lock the front doors and turn this into a "private party" which basically meant that she was going to serve us alcohol and she could only do that if it was a private party and not open to the public. So that was a nice added bonus.

So the point of the class was to work together to make two painting the go together as one. I really didn't think this would be too hard, but shortly after we got started I really started worrying that the two painting wouldn't look anything alike. It seems that Dan was under the impression that they were supposed to look different and that we were both supposed to add our own styling to our paintings. I think the first hour of painting was a whole lot of mis-communication and lack of communication between us. But eventually we started to get on the same page and in the end I'm really happy with how it turned out.

Dan pencil sketched the design for our wavy swirls and we kinda decided together where to put what colors. The whole trick to the class was figuring out how to blend the colors and make smooth transitions from one color to the next. That proved to be more difficult that either of us seemed to expect... or at least I know that I had more trouble with it that I thought I would. And then getting both sides to blend the same way was even harder yet!

Here is Dan hard at work!

and the rest of the group...

... and our finished project!

I am happy to say that our painting are now hanging over our fireplace and they look just as good as I had hoped they would! I love how the lights over our fireplace highlight the copper dot lines in the paintings!

After our painting class we headed over to Cocktails for a late dinner snack and some drinks. I really like the intimate atmosphere there and the food is fabulous. Between the wine at the class and a martini at Cocktails, I was feeling pretty good by the time the night was over! That was probably the most I have had to drink in well over a year! All in all I think it was a great date night and probably my favorite one yet!