It's been a busy beginning to the new year, particularly since Colin is now only 10 days away from defending his dissertation! We've both been buried in a ton of data and analyses lately, so in an effort to re-engage the right sides of our brains, we made plans to go to Paint Nite. Paint Nite is a local startup that hosts painting parties at local bars, with the idea that - with enough wine - anyone can have fun and come away with a decent painting. At each event, an instructor guides you through a step-by-step process to copying one of their paintings.
So last week we bundled up and headed out on the town to paint. At first, it was intimidating. We are both, to put it nicely, detail-oriented perfectionists, so the idea of having to paint without planning first (and not being able to edit and revise! and using the same brush for multiple paint colors!) was disconcerting. But, true to form, the Paint Nite instructors demystified the process, and we both ended up with paintings that exceeded our expectations. And we had a lot of fun in the process. So much that we're planning to go back and do it again!
Without further ado, our masterpieces:
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| Blank canvas: ready, set, go. |
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| Colin putting the finishing touches on his masterpiece. |
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| Signing my painting. |
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| Big C and Little C's paintings |
Even though it was tons of fun, we could have used more time at the end to perfect our masterpieces (see: "detail-oriented perfectionists" above). You can't rush the creative process, guys! Even if the creative process just involves copying someone else's painting. I wanted more time to add highlights to my leaves, and Colin wanted time to add more leaves in general (Colin did compliment me for making my trees look "botanical"--high praise from an ecologist). It was also funny to compare progress throughout the night: we both agreed that I had the better background and Colin had better tree trunks and branches, my leaf coverage was better, but Colin's leaf shading was better--but we both managed to pull something decent together in the end. Overall, it was a success. Good to get away from data for a while, and good to push ourselves out of our perfectionist comfort zones. The wine helped with that.
