Paint Night Way
Yes, we have a Paint Night way of doing things, it is behind what we do, and how we do it.
Paint Night Way – Fun Art and not Fine Art
Paint Night is a social event first and an art class second. You are at a Paint Night Party because you want to have fun first of all, and do a painting class second. Negative criticism of anyone’s painting is strictly verboten. No matter how bad you think a painting is, how bad the perspective, how bad the colours or the subject or the style; I promise you someone out there will think it would look good on their wall. They will offer you thousands for it, the problem is though that they don’t live anywhere near us.
The jokes and puns will be bad by the way.
Paint Night Way – Ease and Quality
We want to make it easy. No drawing, as little tracing as possible. We provide stencils for the more complex shapes, and we keep the painting stages as simple as possible.
To be frank, we aren’t using the most expensive materials, but we aren’t using the cheapest either – somewhere in the middle. Our canvases are rugged, properly rectangular and won’t warp. Our easels are sturdy and our paints are mid-range with lots of pigments, and our brushes are likewise. We use the correct brushes for the job, and are happy to spend money on them.
Paint Night Way – Freewheeling
We want to show you how to do it, not tell you what to do. If you want to do it differently – fine by us. Take a look at the 2 pictures below. The first picture on the right, is the one I demonstrated to the group.
The second picture on the left, is the painting that a 12-year-old boy produced. He painted it the way his abstract artist Grandfather would have done it. We all thought that his version was the better one.
Look at this Eiffel Tower painting, it is a bit out of perspective. The trees are way too big and out of perspective from the point of view of the observer. The Eiffel Tower is too big and the people in the Boulevard too, out of scale. Who cares? Not the people coming to the Paint Night to paint it. Although some will paint it like this, others could turn the canvas on its side, scale the Eiffel Tower and trees down so that it becomes a more traditional styled painting.
The viewpoint of the artist could change so the figures are more in perspective, but maybe it wouldn’t be so striking. It could be striking though if the sky was that of Van Gogh’s starry night. It could be turned into a night scene, on a black canvas with ultra-violet paint.
How about changing the colours of the trees to blue, or turquoise, or yellow? What about painting the Eiffel Tower as a Christmas Tree? Put snow on the ground and on the trees, and Christmas lights on the Tower. How about bringing Darth Vader’s Death Star into the picture. Turn the Eiffel Tower into a ground-based laser weapon and let the two slug it out. You want to do your own thing – feel free.
Paint Night Way – Education
About half of our guests at each Paint Nights are first timers who say they can’t paint, and I say they can, and I prove it. The embarrassing thing also, is that many of these non-painting guests, do a better picture of my demonstration picture than I have done.
I like to add a little art education into my Paint Nights. Maybe a few words on colour mixing and properties – you don’t add black to darken colours, you add purple. A few words on how to get perspective right, and the difference between air and ground perspective.
This is our Paint Night Philosophy, and we hope you tell us if we don’t live up to it.
Take a look at our upcoming events.