A Break From Makeup: I'm Loving This New Wine and Paint Party Trend!

Lately I have been seeing on Facebook that so many people are attending these classes where you basically drink wine while being taught step by step how to paint a picture.  Right from the start I was enamored by this concept as wine and paint are two things I love! Therefore when my mom asked me to go with her to a fundraiser wine and paint event I jumped at the opportunity!  I live in a very small town and the fire hall that hosted this part was PACKED.  They had to book a second class after the initial, because it filled up so fast.  Because I had such a great time I thought I'd share with you all my experience.

So here is the original image that the lesson was based on.  I think my experience was a little different than the classes at the studio because it was a fundraiser.  Usually wine is BYOB but for this event it was supplied by the hosts I'm assuming.  We bought our tickets early so we got a 2 hour paint lesson, a decorated wine glass, and two glasses of wine for $40.  Lessons at the studio are $40 and BYOB, and I'm not sure on the wine glass situation.  Anyway we all sat down at an canvas that had 3 paint brushes, an apron, a paper towel, and a cup of water.  

This is a step by step progression compilation of our paintings.  The instructor stood at the front and walked us through each step. Another employee was going around the room providing extra paint to anyone who needed it.  We all got a squirt of red, blue, yellow, brown, black, and white on a paper plate.  This meant we had to mix all colors on our own.  As you can see my mom and I deviated from the original color scheme, as did a lot of other people.  The instructor said this was fairly unusual and was pretty excited that we were all being so unique.  The instructor herself was very patient and clear in her instructions.  I didn't think her picture was that great but it is very possible that she did not do her best as to prevent making the participants feel bad about their work.

Here is a close up of my finished image.  I chose to make the vases resemble Erlenmeyer flasks because I'm nerdy and ridiculous.  I opted to not write the words as my handwriting is horrendous.  I want to go in with a sharpie and add measure lines to the vases to really drive home that science theme. Some of the details I added on my own based on the original.  For example the instructor did not explain how to do colored shading.  Instead she just had the class ad the black line down the middle of each petal and a white highlight.  She also did not have us do the black and white details on the brown background. Additionally she did not say to slant the middle of the outside flowers to create a perspective of them facing another direction.

And here is a picture of my mom and I with our paintings!  To put this in perspective, I paint from time to time but I only do portraits, this was my first time every painting a flower.  My mom has never picked up a paintbrush IN HER LIFE.  She has zero artistic ability or experience and she was still able to keep up and produce a nice painting.  Therefore do not let your lack of artistic ability deter you from giving this a try.  You might be surprised with what you create!

I hope you enjoyed my wine and paint experience.  The specific studio that taught this class was aMuse Uncorked.  I live in a pretty small town but there are at least three of these studios within a 45 minute drive of my house, therefore you should hopefully not have a problem finding one near you!

Have fun, drink wine, and get painting!

A Break from Makeup: Strawberry White Zinfandel Cupcakes

I found a recipe for strawberry champagne cupcakes online through a friend and decided that it was necessary to make them using White Zinfandel instead.  My friend and I recently took on the challenge! The following baking pictorial follows this recipe (mostly). 

So before we begin here is what the final product looked like! Yummy! :D

So we began by mixing the dry ingredients together.  We didn't have cake flour so we made our own by mixing normal unbleached flour and corn starch.  In a separate container we combined the wet ingredients including the Sutter Home White Zin and (almost) pureed strawberries.  We didn't have quite enough strawberries to meet the recipes requirements but the cupcakes still tasted of strawberry.

Then we were supposed to add red food coloring but of course we had none. Instead we thought it would be awesome to add blue instead in the hope that it would make purple.......it didn't. It looked like grey nastiness but luckily this didn't show through in the baked cupcakes, haha.

Putting the batter into the cupcake tins.  It was much thicker than we were used to working with.

While the cupcakes baked we simmered a cup of white zin down to two tablespoons in preparation to make the icing.

Once the butter cream icing was properly mixed we added the wine to the icing and it made a pretty light pink and AMAZINGLY delicious mixture.

Cupcakes are out of the oven and aren't grey! YAY!

Here is a final shot of our cupcakes after everything cooled and the icing was applied.  Would I do this again? Sort of.  The cake itself was decent but the icing is really where its at.  I want to put white zinfandel icing on every cupcake I ever make for the rest of forever. So. Good. I definitely recommend grabbing your favorite semi sweet wine and using it to make some awesome cupcakes!!