It is all fun and games until someone calls you on it

Okay...so, you know how when you are talking with someone about them buying a house and instead of a gift, joke that you are going to paint them a painting that they have to hang over the mantle and it becomes this sort of running joke? You do? Great. Well, this is my warning to avoid it at all costs. Spoiler alert...it ends bad. Oh, it seems like innocent fun at first but then they actually get the house and you have been joking about it so long that they state that they now require the aforementioned painting and you sit down to paint something ridiculous, get overpowered by your overactive perfectionist tendencies and proceed to spend 10 hours painting and repainting and repainting again. I started with a huge canvas that was painted various greens in straight strokes that was then covered with a background of various greens made with sweeping strokes. The difference? No difference. Just the evil voice in my head telling me that something just seems off. Evil voice aka Black Hole of Time. The background debacle then devolved into visions of 3 dimension and in turn, taking to a melamine wine glass with a jig saw and belt sander. Yes, that was me in the back yard sanding my $1.50 cent plastic cup. We will just skip right over the attempts to make wine using acrylic water and food coloring with foil as the container. I went through two small canvases on the big green canvas and then one small canvas on a medium one painted purple. I had a wine bottle on the small canvas along with 4 layers of yellow paint covering my attempts at painting a cup. My first cup looked amazingly like glass. The problem? In my attempt to attain the "how" of painting glass, I forgot the "how" of keeping things in proportion. When I stepped back, my wine glass was ginormous in comparison to the bottle. So it was double the width...it looked like glass! My attempt to fix the goliath cup is a fuzzy memory but what is clear is that editing at midnight is never a good idea. I woke up this morning and did not remember it looking that bad last night. Final solution...bottles. Big on coverage, little on detail. No matter what color or shape you end up with, calling it intentional, with bottles, works. All I have to say is that I am entirely thankful to be done, she so owes me for this and that there is this joke about a human size vase for a wedding present that I fully plan to nip in the bud tomorrow...

Clearly it is not Picasso but for my first completed painting, I consider the fact that you can tell what they are to be success in itself. Trust me, the attempt with the stick figure holding a full color wine bottle did not fall in this category.