BYOB Paint Classes and First Official Consignment Deal!!

You guys have heard of Groupon, yeah? (If not, it's a service that works with businesses to offer discount buys of services/goods that basically help businesses get noticed or get some easy business to try and retain long-term customers. They provide emails and have deals not just for your city, state but also for vacation trips and more! It's pretty awesome.) Well, my friend got a couple of classes scheduled through Groupon to a BYOB Paint class at a place called Easely Amused here in Austin, TX. If any of you can, I highly suggest making it out to one of their classes sometime. They've only been open for 2 months, but the owner Bridget, is FANTASTIC!! She makes the classes so much fun with little stories, jokes and just her love of what she does!

For these classes, you are allowed to BringYourOwnBeverage (see beer or wine, etc ;) ), you pay the $30-$40 (depending on size) for the art piece you want, and you are provided all the supplies from the canvas to the brushes to the paints. Once the class is over, you get to go home with your very own piece of art that YOU painted. It doesn't matter your skill level when you go, it will turn out however you want it to. The awesome thing is to see the variety that comes out of the same class, with the same instructor and all the different choices people make and ways they paint.

This is pretty much what you start off with: a blank canvas, a plate full of paint colors, water cup for your brushes and whatever brushes deemed necessary by Bridget you'll need for the picture and of course, my choice of beverage for the night was a bottle of Cabernet Savignon.. yummmm!

This is after a few steps of a blue wash on the top 3rd of the canvas, kiwi green on the middle and a darker green on the bottom of the canvas. Then layers of dots from a pumpkin red all over, to a red on the bottom half and a bright orange on the top half.

Here we have Airon deep in thought as she's adding the leaves on her trees.

This is my finished piece, with a few more layers of leaves added on (including some dark reddish brown leaves in the bottom right corner of the foliage) and tree trunks, nice and whispy!!

Airon's showcasing her awesome finished piece! She added the extra white stripes near the trunks in the grassy area and a few holes in the leaves along with adding a pretty cute bird's nest with some robins!!

After the class, I got curious if I could re-create this picture again. Only, I didn't want to do a full-size so I grabbed a 2"x3" miniature canvas from my stock and.....

What do you guys think?? Pretty similar, eh?! Painting in miniature is pretty challenging! I maybe could have added more layers of leaves, but I like the way it looks now!

The next picture we did (we had 2 Groupon sessions) was poppies!! This is the first few steps done:

We did about 5 yellow dots anywhere on the canvas to place our poppies, then made red sort of flower bodies around them. Then we did a light blue wash down the middle and dark blue on the outsides.

Then we did another round of the blue washes to make them darker. This is Airon's (she wanted more than 5 :) :

This one is mine:

The next few steps were to darken and texturize the poppies, add some dark brown and black scribbles in the centers, leaving however much of the yellow we wanted, and then add some lavender and pink to the meeting ground of light and dark blues and added kiwi green stems.

I added a little more texture to the flowers and was done with mine:

Airon added a few more details and stems and such to hers and here is her final piece!!:

All in all, I'd say these classes, if you have a studio near you, are a MUST!!!! If you happen to be in the Austin, TX area, you can find Easely Amused here. You can also take a look through the picture gallery to see the variance of these pieces people have painted!

 It was such an awesome experience, both times and even though it was the same studio and same instructor, the experiences were still different!! It's also pretty awesome to see all the variations on final pieces with the same instructions!!

Now to the more exciting part!!

I showed Bridget about 10-12 pieces of my jewelry and the pink and brown flowered gathered clutch I showed you guys the other day.... SHE LOVED IT ALL!!! She's giving me a whole shelf on a bookshelf that is in her lobby with the backside facing a full wall WINDOW to the outside/street!! I am so excited about this opportunity for consignment and look forward to working with Bridget on this first time endeavor for my business and hobby!!

Now I just have to price everything, make more clutches, figure out displays, layout on the shelf, etc.....

SO EXCITED!!!! I can't wait to setup my shelf and don't worry, I will definitely show you guys what I come up with!

Craft ya laters!!

New ideas, new upcoming projects, new inspiration!!

Previously on Artfire: Published On: 06-29-2012

So I've been gone for a bit because I was working 2 jobs, but I quit that one about a couple months ago and since then, have just basically been settling in to the new house we moved in to in March, but also have been incredibly busy at the day job! Thankfully however, we have internet access and in my minutes here and there, I have found inspiration to start crafting again and MAKE the time at home to do stuff!!

I have started a pinterest account and through this, I have found lots of awesome ideas, and I continue to find awesome things each time I go on, but have also posted a lot of ideas for things I would like to try and have even tried a few already!!

Here are a few of the things I've come up with and will be aiding in my immediate future projects/items. Please forgive the poor photo quality, I have had issues with my digital camera capturing the colors just right and/or have used my camera phone just to get these up for you guys:


These are done with shades of purple in an ombre-style painting, then stenciled on the black rose, first one has silver paint to accent (I accidentally used a little too much black paint and it seeped under the edges of the stencil, honest 1st-time type of mistake) so for the second one, I didn't use as much paint and then just sprinkled a little purple glitter over in a few spots and it was much better!
 
This one I painted a 2-tone background, a wooden table with a pink tablecloth draped on it at an angle and a blue pearly vase and attached silk flowers to look like a flower vase on the hall table perhaps.

This one was just the blue pearly background (love this color!!), brown tree branch painted on and then the white silk flowers were glued on to look like a cherry blossom tree in full bloom on a beautiful spring morning!

For this one, I painted thick stripes of red and a dark orange as the background, if I'd had a stencil I would have used it but unfortunately for the leaves, I cut these out by hand out of card-stock and then laid it down and sponged around with the gold to have the imprint show of the background.

All the canvases above were painted using acrylic paint and 3"x3" canvases and then sprayed with a gloss varnish-type spray to seal in the paint and to give the awesome extra gloss look.

Yes, believe it or not, these are all only 3"x3" canvases!! I have gotten 24 of these little guys and am having a blast with testing out techniques on them!! This has been a good way to make sure that before I get to a larger, more permanent canvas, I am less likely to make a big mistake and if I do make one, it'll be less severe just as I have a basic idea of what to do.

You should be able to find the blank canvases in a 6-pack at Hobby Lobby for about US $5.00; I haven't found an online supplier yet as I was really anxious to get these the day I wanted to play!!

Next I will post a couple of resin pieces/projects I've done/am working on!!