1. Take a Painting Class

I love art - I love making it, looking at it, being a part of it!  I especially love enhancing my current skill set and it has been a long time since I've taken any sort of art class that allowed me to do that (since college!)  This was a fun goal to accomplish, it not only suits my personality, but I met new people and I got something tangible to walk away with. 

To accomplish the goal of "Take a Painting Class", I bought a Groupon for Colorado Free University.  CFU is a place that offers all kinds of classes and they are very reasonably priced .  I looked at several different types of art classes to take and finally settled on a "Watercolor Batik" class.  I did batik in high school and thought it was cool and my watercolor painting skills can always use some work so it was a good fit for me. 

The class was taught by two old bitty's - one that was pretty nice but managed to convince one of my classmates to do more to her painting and in the process, helped her ruin it.  DOH!  The other lady was not  my favorite person - she was a bit on the crabby side and she thwarted my creativity by making me stop working on my background to do the leaves.  That irked me, but I understand why now, even though I should've just kept doing what I wanted.  :)

Batik is usually done on cloth and involves the process of using wax to cover areas that you don't want painted.  For this class, we batik'd on paper instead of cloth.  It starts out looking like this:

I wanted to keep my calla lillies white, so I put hot wax over them and started painting everything else.  Once I had what I wanted painted, I added another layer of wax before I finished the background (the leaves got covered with wax so I didn't mess up and accidently paint over them). 

Here is a picture with some additional areas covered with wax - you can see the beads of paint on the waxed areas. 

Between each painting session and each waxing session, you have to make sure your picture is fully dry or else the wax won't stick and you'll likely paint some areas that you don't want painted. 

Here is a picture with the entire painting covered in wax. 

The next step after this is to peel your painting off the wax paper and crumple it up.  That will cause some of the wax to fall off.  Then you can add the "crackle" effect by painting over the entire thing with a darker color.  When you are finished with that, you put the painting between several layers of newspaper and iron the wax out of the paper until it appears you have melted it all off onto the newspaper.  The final result is a frameable piece of art!

Here is a picture of me and my painting - I like it.  I put it in my work cubicle to add some color to the otherwise very vanilla walls I have to look at every day.  At some point, I'll likely frame it and give it away to somebody.  With this new skill added to my arsenal, I'm looking forward to having some girlfriends over for a wine and batiking night!