This year my eldest daughter Tammi gifted me a Paint and pretzels session for Mother’s day.
Now, if you know me, you know that I’m incredibly hard to buy for as my gypsy soul loves everything but my need for a clutter free home often means I buy or am gifted many things, only to gift them on to someone who can use them more.
I am however, a huge fan of experience gifting and I absolutely loved this gift.
Who are paint and pretzel?
Paint and pretzel is a mobile art studio.
They arrange pop up art studio experiences and do the decor, workshop and clean up. You can even arrange catering through them.
The idea is that they hold various sessions in a variety of places, and you gather together and are guided to create a picture.
Alternatively you can book your own ladies night, birthday events, Batchelor or team building experiences with them.
About the event
We arrived at Seaside villiage to find the ladies setting up a long tressel table beautifully decorated with canvas, paints and flowers.
The image to recreate looked quite complex and even though I am creative, there were certain moments of doubt in my mind as to how exactly this painting would turn out.
Before we began we were handed our paint supplies, brushes and wine orders were taken along with the lunch menu.
Then it was explained that this was not an art lesson but rather a fun way to create your own masterpiece with a little guidance – at this point I truly doubted that I’d be creating anything nearly good enough to take home.
And then we began painting. Instructions on how to make our blue/grey sky and add light to our ocean.
Mine was starting to resemble a very stormy ocean scene and as I finished my island and trees I was super reluctant to add the giant big purple cosmos flowers to my new painting.
Trust the process they say …and so I followed the flower instructions with much frustration and a lot of patience from the instructor.
I’m a creative and barley even follow a recipe to the tee . Mostly I view instructions as a rough guide to how things should be done which is why my art teacher once failed me for thinking out the box too much.
The beauty of workshops like this are that no two pictures are the same and honestly mine looks nothing like the original when I was finished.
But I was super proud of how mine came out and impressed that it vaguely resembled the image we had been tasked to paint.
The ladies are lovely, guide you gently and are at hand to show you where to shade or fix up an image. They were also really patient with me adding my own touches to the painting, and I loved the friendly, relaxed ambience
I could get addicted to 2 hours alone just to paint.
As for the painting. I brought it, home and Hamish kept admiring it, telling me how good it was and even though he’s only 6 , I’m taking the praise.
Brent decided he needed the picture in his office. I’m not sure how I feel about it being displayed for all and sundry to see but hey I always wanted to see my creative works displayed out of the house so I guess I’ll just start with that .
Today an industrial office in Paarden Eiland …tomorow the Louve! ( a girl can dream can’t she?!)
I really like this picture! The pink against the grey. It’s beautiful. 🙂