I'm going to go ahead and change my name to Monet

I never took art in school. I can't draw a stick figure worth a crap and I hated coloring as a child. I didn't have the patience to color in the lines when I could finish it quickly and move onto something more fun like talking. I know there are several report cards out there that mention I talked to much in elementary school. In my defense, I finished my work first.

Anyway, my friend Reneè had bought some groupon-like vouchers for one of those wine/art studio painting classes and asked if wanted to go. I have been wanting to try one after seeing some friend's paintings on Facebook. We went to Vino Artino a few weeks ago to paint bluebonnets. Reneè brought some yummy salted chocolate and malbec. I love malbec but my brain does not so I only had about a glass to keep from having a migraine.

I have to say, I am impressed with how my painting came out. And it's 90% due to the very specific instructions we were given. The instructor told us how much paint to mix with other colors, which brush to use and when to add water to keep the paint from thickening.

Below is a photo essay of my attempt at painting this:

The professional version

We started with painting the sky and grass. I was pretty impressed with myself at this point. Those clouds? They are awesome.

Next we were supposed to make some bushes and a little hill. This is where I started to doubt my ability to paint.

The "hill" looks like a smashed bush. And the bush is just ugly.

Trees seem like they would be easy. Just draw some lines. My tree looked like it survived Hurricane Ike.

Hurricane Tree

Grass/chicken scratch

After we added some grass we added some plants at the bottom of the page. You can seem them in the later pictures. Then we moved on to my favorite part. We added the leaves to the tree. It was fun to add the different colors and layer them and use fun brush strokes.

Happy tree!

At this point, we moved on to the windmill and barn. I was pretty sure my painting was ruined at this point.

What did I do?

It looked a little better after I filled in the barn and added some shading to the windmill.

Now it's time to start Texas-ing up the thing and adding the bluebonnets.

All done!

Masterpiece!

I thought about signing my name in the corner but I am pretty sure that would have turned into a big globby mess. I definitely want to go to another class though! It was a lot of fun and I have a cool painting.