50 Shades of Blue: A Paint Nite Date Night

I was actually able to surprise Lady Hiva for a date night this week! Usually she figures out what it is that I have planned so I was really excited that I kept it a secret for so long (little did she know that all she had to do was check my email and she would have seen it). I never told her what we were doing and she thought she was SO smart and just KNEW that we were going to see Mary Poppins in Provo (which we need to do sometime). But no, we went to Paint Nite.

Paint Nite is an international company that teams up with local restaurants to provide a night of creativity. All you have to do is look up a place that does it in your area and choose which painting you want to complete. Of course I chose a beach painting for us to do.

This is the painting that we are supposed to make...

When you arrive they give you an apron and a tea towel and you choose a place to sit at a blank canvas. As the night progresses, you eat and drink and the instructor walks you through the painting, color by color. She was going a bit slow for me…imagine that…so I decided to detour away from her instructions and add a some rocks, a lighthouse, and some little yellow flowers to mine.

Proof that we started with nothing...literally a blank canvas

Lady Hiva must have been bored too because she had many different abstract renditions of the painting before she was done. This included a change in colors and even some water splash streaks at some point. We had fun doing something different and enjoyed the people around us at all different artistic levels. Their reactions to painting ranged from “I am sweating making this bird” to “I feel so creative now! It makes me want to become a painter!”

She told me to pretend I was painting...

One of the many versions of Lady's painting

The painting was supposed to be 5 different colors at different areas, but that was not enough for me, so I mixed and mixed and stirred and mixed some more until I had several colors I liked…by the end my palate (paper plate) was a collage of strange colors as if the rainbow had exploded onto it! Lady Hiva’s looked so pristine and orderly. (Perhaps telling of our personalities?)

 

So if you are looking for a great date idea…here is one (oh and I was able to get 50% off on a Groupon discount so it saves even more!) 

Our finished products with the two people we chatted with all night