Murder Mystery Night

For last weekend, I organized a murder mystery event at the studio.  We had a two hour date night painting taught over three hours with an extra hour for guests to enjoy s'getti and to interrogate the suspects. All 4 staff members maintained their character descriptions while the audience played the role as detectives and questioned each suspect specific questions. Upon arrival at the studio, each couple (it was a date night painting meaning that when you put two canvases together, it created a full image) received a "confidential" bag full of character descriptions, a pen to make notes on them, and disguises.  We made 1920's style flapper feather headbands, recycled some mardi gras beads by spray painting them to look like pearls, bought stick-on mustaches, and made decorative pin-on bowties. Meet our corpse: Lovely Lisa Our beautiful corpse! She had such a compassionate soul and was always looking out for the young girls around town.  She made sure that they didn't get associated with any of the riff-raff, no matter how charming they appeared. Dedicated to her job, Lisa was the best at what she did. Rest in Peace, our lovely Lisa.  
Meet the Lavish Lyndsie: Extravagant entrepreneur of the town and our venue owner.  No man could every keep up with a woman this driven.  Even if he could, he would have a hard time holding her especially with both her hands so firmly clasped to that flask . Either she's insane or a genius but one thing is for sure: She's going to make sure that nothing is going to ruin her party.  As long as you stay out of her way, you'll be sure this party will be one of the best you've ever attended. Take caution crossing her path.  Bourbon can make a sane person do some weird things. Meet Jolly Jacob: As the newest staff member to Painting with a Twist, no one really knows a lot about this dude.  I've heard that he got red lighted from his past gig with the Townsend Bros Circus.  He's always standing around fiddling with his knives and talking about improving his knife throwing act.
 
 Meet Charming Christina: Our studio beauty has the reputation of being a little bit of a gold-digger.  She's definitely not the sharpest tool in the shed but she sure can sweet talk anyone you throw her way.  If you have deep pockets, chances are that you're going to receive a lot of her attention.  Christina was the closest of everyone to Lisa, kind of like a daughter.  Be careful when questioning her.  She spends a lot of time on her eyeliner and crying ruins all her hard work.
 I wrote questions for two rounds of questioning as well as the information that each character should supply inquiring ears.  We also had a round where guests were to search our studio for murder weapons.  We cut out pictures of possible murder weapons the size of about 1" X 1" and placed them hidden in some of the paintings we had on display.  This caused guests to view our upcoming events therefore allowing us to promote our business.  Once they found a weapon, they could turn the canvas around where a slip of paper would give more information about the weapon like if there is was bullet missing or if the item is dusty.

We exposed Lisa was considering opening a competing business in the town over with her 'charity case' girls.  Christina was angry with Lisa for running off a wealthy, bad news man she was involved with. Jacob snuck around in drank corners collecting information about Lyndsie's business practices in order to sue her. We tried to make this plot as juicy as we could. This was a day that I loved my job.

My assistant manager and I pulled all the lamps from our houses and decorated the private party room as the restaurant/speakeasy with battery operated tea lights and our lamps so we could avoid using the fluorescent lighting.  We added table clothes and decorated placemats.  We made a ragtime playlist to encourage the 1920s theme. I played the role of Chief Inspector and gave the audience directions throughout the evening on what activities they should be doing during the painting breaks. The extra 15 hours I put in for this event was well worth it.  Although next time there are some details that will need better refinement, friday night was a hit.

Fall Break

To be completely honest, I don't have much to blog about for this past week.  After a long work week, and midterms last week, I was fried.  So the following week (which happened to be last week) I decided to lay low.  I took my second vacation of the year from work strategically played during fall break so that I could have both work and school off for a few days. (F-T) I spent most of my time off outside with camping, fishing, hiking, playing with my dog and enjoying coffee on my parents front porch swing.
I struggle with maintaining the pace I have set for myself every semester.  As much as a appreciate taking breaks, it's always painful coming back and getting back into the groove of things.
 It was a nice weekend to re-center myself with my dog, Bean, my parents, and Ferne Clyffe State Park.  

Teaching Portraits

I coordinate a lot of events for my job and teach a lot of different classes.  In most of our classes we lead people through artwork that is copyright protected by Painting with a Twist LLC corporate office out of Mandeville, LA.  Not very often do we teach artwork that an artist from our studio has created.  Although once a month I do teach a class called Paint your Own Pet, where all the designs are custom made by me and pre sketched on the canvas prior to guests' arrival.  This past month we started offering a new custom class, Paint your own Portrait.  This brought a new challenge for me to figure out how to guide a group of 20 people through different designs within 2 hours.  People are difficult to paint successfully for an experienced artist and 90% of our guests haven't touched a paint brush since kindergarten.  I knew this was gonna take some work to figure out.

 Now, the corporate example we worked off of showed the portrait done with a lot of solid black lines and highlights. This style allowed me to teach skin tone without having to show them how to add highlights and shades through skin tone values.
 
 After trying our a few teaching methods on an example, I decided on a technique to try for our first class. I'm so excited our well these portraits turned out! I'm even more impressed that everyone was able to finish their paintings within the 2 hour time frame.

 Now I have two example paintings that I get to put fun rules on! I'm thinking about for the Kim Kardashian one of putting: 'Rule #3: No drinking the paint water. No paintbrushes in your drink'.  And for the more interesting man in the world: 'I don't always paint, but when I do ________'. I was also informed that he definitely needed a beer next to him.