Paint By Number

Good morning everyone, and welcome to Jolie’s first and last ever painting class. Grab your apron and let’s get started!

Choose your seat wisely. It’s probably not a grand plan to sit next to a sister-in-law who can paint like Michelangelo. You want to focus on the lady to your right, who is wearing more paint on her face than you will use on your canvas. She knows what’s up.

For this session, you will need a blank canvas, three paintbrushes and several random puddles of paint on a paper plate. We did not name the colors because art cannot be restrained by labels.

I’m gonna need a bigger glass…….

In honor of our adulting activity, here is your wine. Keep that vino flowing and don’t mix up your wine glass with your paintbrush cleaning glass or you will have a VERY interesting painting at the end of this hour.

I know what you’re saying: “But Jolie, I have the artistic abilities of a rhino with a cottonball on the end of his snout. I can’t even paint my living room walls…with only one color to choose from!”

I’m here for you. Buckle up.

Let’s do this.

1. Choose your large brush and dip it into the tidy hot pink paint puddle. Then double-dip it into the tidy cobalt puddle. Mix these two colors and form a little Secret Sauce, then smear it across the top of your canvas.
2. Lower your bar. Set your expectations to kindergarten refrigerator art level, and we don’t mean kid #1 level, we mean kid #4 level.
3. Don’t panic. We all make happy little accidents. To paint an orange streak across a purple sky, you must allow the sky to dry first. You must keep the orange streak thick enough to not let the purple show through. You must blend, blend, blend the orange into the red next to it, and the red must still be wet enough to be friendly at the border but not abdicate entirely and – horse pucky! – don’t let the purple show through the red; now look what you’ve done.
4. Drink more whine wine.
5. Use a hairdryer to speed-dry your sky and begin again by painting over the whole muck with a fresh layer of Secret Sauce. Move on to your grass.
6. Choose your medium brush and wonder why we don’t just skip straight into finger-painting as you boldly wipe your hand onto your apron because this is someone else’s laundry.
7. Using the citron and cerulean paint puddles, create a shade of green that you will never be able to replicate. Start spreading Pesto with wild abandon over the middle of the canvas. Moving quickly, blend the shades of green until you run out of cerulean (is the sky dry YET?) and tell yourself that grass can be Lemony if it wants to.
8. The lady to your right is enjoying her third glass of wine. She has painted a rocket ship.
9. Go back to your sky. Your sunset looks like a nuclear blast that stopped just shy of due north and we are not going to argue with it. Choose your small brush and let’s add some far-away cloudlets for depth. (Note to self: these are not little sheep floating in the Gamma rays. Do not give them legs.)
10. Go back to your grass. All of the puddles on your paper plate palette have become a single quagmire of uncertain hue. Swipe that nasty across the bottom of your canvas. Call it “Ominous Shadow”.
11. Make Ominous trees at the horizon; drop some Ominous blobs into your grass.
12. Ask for fresh paint.
13. Ask for fresh wine.
14. Ask the art teacher to stop rolling her eyes behind your back.
15. Make bluebonnets. Or blue pinecones. Blue hand grenades? Whatever. Mutter something about thumbprints.

This one’s going on my Mom’s fridge. She has to. It’s the rules.

Use a hairdryer to dry your sweaty bangs set the paint. Sign and date your canvas so that your great-grandvarmints can laugh at their ancestor’s artwork sell it for millions when you’re famous.

If Grandma Moses can do it, so can you.

I hope you enjoyed your artistic venture as much as I did! Be sure to hang your painting in a prominent place in your home, like over the commode, or perhaps in the garage next to the mounted bass that sings Christmas carols.

Join us next week as my sister-in-law drags us once again, where we have no business going.