Birds of a Feather

If you are interested in learning how to paint, or improving your painting abilities, definitely consider That Paint Thing! This is a new start up company run by a nice lady named Rachel. She is an amazing artist and provides high quality paint lessons, as well as painting tips.

The location varies for each paint lesson so that Rachel can have a greater outreach of interest and more people can come to the paint nights, but this particular paint night was located at the Godfather’s Pizza in South Jordan, Utah. I heard from painters who come often, that she does painting nights at ice cream parlors, frozen yogurt restaurants, and even schools.

I really enjoyed this painting night! If you had been to Paint Loft in Provo, it is very similar, but has a twist on things. Rachel recorded herself completing the painting prior to the paint class and has the recording playing while you paint.

This allows you to go at your own pace, but also to watch and see close up, how and what she is painting. The nice thing is, she also pauses the video if the majority of the class gets behind or needs a break. Rachel does walk around and is able to help paint or show actual painting techniques as well.

This particular paint class, we each got three canvas’ and a row of paints. We started out by painting all three canvas’ sky blue. This took about 20 minutes since we had to mix the paints to get the right tone that we wanted. We also painted the top, bottom, and sides of the canvas sky blue. Then, we painted a line right across the bottom quarter area which the birds would later sit on. We started painting the blue birds first. These birds were composed of two circles.

The tail was an elongated heart. Then we would take a speck of white paint which we would blend in to highlight the stomach and heads. We did about 2 blue birds for each panel section of canvas.

The red birds were next. This was the same process, just with the color red. Green and orange were a bit trickier. We had to put down a white “shadow” in which we could later paint over with orange and yellow. This way, the blue background paint would not blend or disappoint the yellow and green paints.

Next we painted the beaks. These were just orange triangles. Except for the orange bird, we did orange beaks, and the orange bird would have black beaks.

The eyes were simple black dots and the final touch was the feet gripping the wire or branch below them.

Throughout the painting class which lasted around two hours, there are candy raffles. This allows a fun little break and exciting chance to win some candy. Typically, painters get “included” food and drinks from the restaurant hosting as well to keep up the energy of the artists. I highly recommend coming to one of these events as they are kid and family friendly!