Average Jane Takes A Painting Class

Last week I created something that serves as a vivid reminder (literally and figuratively) of why I'm a writer and not a graphic artist. 

This photo may be my favorite piece of artwork to emerge from the entire experience. Foreshadowing!

A while back, Cagey emailed me about a LivingSocial offer for a painting class at ARTichokes. We were originally going to do an abstract class, but that one got canceled, so instead we ended up in a class where we were led through the steps to paint a still life of some tomatoes in a dish on a table. I'm not going to lie: that isn't a subject matter that I was anxious to have represented in my home decor scheme. But what can you do?

I will say that the gallery where the classes were held was really cool. And they let you bring your own wine to drink during the class. So they got huge points for that.

The instructor had us start off by dividing the canvas into sections and outlining the tomatoes and their dish.

You can already tell that my tomatoes aren't quite as tomato-shaped as a person might want.

Then we started adding other colors. 

And shading.

And more shading.

I'm not so good at the shading.

And I'm really bad at highlighting!

Sad to say, that last photo is of my final result. It looks like a pomegranate on a tie-dyed sheet with two other pomegranates sitting on a Polaroid of the sheet. I will not be hanging this up in my house.

The good (?) news is that it was no worse than anyone else's rendition.

However, despite the undesirability of the finished product, the whole experience was a ton of fun! I enjoyed the entire evening and I would take another class there or do one of their open art nights without hesitation.

Maybe I can even bring back my tomato canvas and paint something better over it.