Painting Jeanie

Take it from an old person - after a certain point, birthdays are confusing and disruptive. You have to use math to work out how old you are - and no one you know wants to attend a 90-minute party to eat jelly and ice cream and play pin the tail on the unicorn anymore.

So, the trick is to require only one thoughtful gift from a spouse or close personal acquaintance - and to throw all your (limited remaining) energy into An Experience. This year's experience, thanks completely to my gift-buying spouse extraordinaire, was a Paint Your Pet evening, with wine (or Coke, if you're me).

Look, I can't paint. I can't draw. I can barely get a decent image out of AI. This is not my area of expertise. Luckily, these evenings are not intended to draw attention to your artistic flaws and send you home with permanent proof of your creative inadequacies. You will leave with an at-least-acceptable thing to hang on a wall. Maybe not above the mantelpiece, but definitely somewhere people will see it.

To that end, before I'd even arrived, the guy leading the group (Jami) had prepared my canvas based on the photo I was using as a guide. This is Jeanie.

After that, though, it was all me. What color should I paint the background? Red! I will do a dark-red to light red ombré...which turned out a very pleasant and uniformly consistent red. This, I think, was my best moment.

Step two: Shadows. Add the shadows in a dark color that is not black. Jami very much didn't want us to use black unless we were mixing it from gray. Why? I have no idea. Perhaps we're just not ready to wield the black paint. So anyway, my shadows are purple. And no, I did not intend for the paint to run like that.

I really wanted to stop here. This has a "suffering van Gogh" feeling. This is Jeanie with the flu, wrapped up in a cozy blanket. At this point, I'm feeling like maybe I am a painting genius - avant-garde, sure, but that can still be genius-level. This is The Scream for the twenty-first century.

This, then, of course, is where the confidence plummets. I go, in the space of moments, from avant-garde magnum opus to hyperactive toddler's scribble. Ye gods, what is that under her chin? What's going on at the bottom of the canvas? What's going on with the lines between her eyes? This is hopeless and completely unfixable! I have crafted a challenge that even Jami can't fix. Anyway, I've lost faith in Jami as he keeps telling I'm "doing so well." Have you lost control of your sense, Jami?

I'm sorry, Miss Jeanie Underfoot. Don't hate me.

Wait! I pass the painting along to Jami and he - honestly - does hardly anything to it. He just does a dab here, a dab there. Some light shading, some almost invisible magic. He clearly knows what he's doing.

And suddenly...I have my painting!

So there it is - equally at home at a super-creative Austin art gallery and a precocious primary school student's art class. Wait until I put it in a frame - the frame will be the game-changer.