A Healthy JD

Paint Your Pets!

November 23, 2011 By Jamie 5 Comments

A couple of nights ago Anthony, Ang and I attended the monthly Paint Your Pet session at Painting With a Twist. Let me back up to about 3 weeks ago when I discovered this gem and sent Ang an e-mail asking if she would like to join me in painting a portrait of our beloved fur children. She was incredibly excited (though definitely not as excited as I was) and we quickly booked our seats. I then realized I was left with the impossible decision of choosing between these two adorable faces:

And seeing how that was pretty much impossible I begged asked Anthony to join us so we could each paint one of the pups. Thankfully he is an awesome husband and he agreed.

We started with these:

And I brought this along to help release the creative juices:

I was clearly getting my drink on having a blast:

While Anthony and Ang were rocking some serious game faces:

After the photo-shoot I buckled down, zoned out and painted Shelby. I was worried at first because of how white she is and figured it would be near impossible to capture any sort of dimension but in the end I loved the way it turned out.

Anthony struggled with Chloe’s portrait because the picture we sent in did not indicate her true color and the paint they provided him with was nowhere near her coloring (it was white and light brown). So he took a shot at mixing a color and wasn’t happy with the result. At this point he bowed out and asked me to finish Chloe’s portrait since I was done with Shelby. I happily took over since I was kind of bummed I finished so early and had very little to paint thanks to our incredibly white wolf dog.

It was hard to paint Chloe’s portrait since I had to visualize her true color in my head AND because the brown paint Anthony used as a base color, while semi-true to her coloring completely covered all of the dimension that the artist had sketched into her face. So I just winged it and hoped for the best. I was really impressed with what I was able to accomplish honestly:

The instructors were great; they made me feel like a real Van Gogh. The only downside was that our class was booked and it was hard to get the instructors’ attention but when we did they were incredibly helpful and eager to help us get the most out of our portraits. Here is a group shot that represents about half of the portraits painted that night.  They all turned out great…I especially love the black lab directly under Anthony and Chloe; the guy used a lot of blue and gray paint to create dimension which is really creative and turned out awesome.

I had brainstormed two potential locations for these paintings depending on how they turned out. If they were more abstract (read: not the greatest) they were going to hide out in the guest room. If they turned out really well I was going to put them in our bedroom above the dogs’ beds. Luckily both our guest room and our master bedroom are painted gray so I knew the background colors we chose (green and purple) would work with both. The paintings found their way on the walls the minute we got home (because my patience level is that of a child):

And I love them! Every time I enter our room I smile at how adorable it is to have our dogs memorialized like this. Also, I’d like to note that when presented with their portraits the dogs seemed less than impressed with my artistic skills and more impressed with sniffing the freshly painted canvas. Oh well, what can you do.

I seriously wish we had more pets that I could paint. I’m definitely heading back to Painting With a Twist in the near future because they offer tons of cool classes that rotate pretty often. There are a ton of Painting With a Twist locations and I’d highly suggest checking it out if there is one in your city. Even if you don’t have a pet, just check out the calendar…they offer so many cool classes! I want to do the owl one next and one of the tree ones! Another perk, the ability to bring snacks and wine. And in case wine isn’t your thing (such a shame!), Anthony brought a mixed  drink in a travel container and I don’t think they noticed or cared.

On that note I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving! It is just going to be Anthony and I this year but that isn’t stopping us from cooking up an amazing feast for two. On that note, I should probably start menu planning for tomorrow. Goodnight!

Jamie