In January 2022, one of my cousins gave me some extra paints her kids weren’t using, which ended up spawning 15+ paint nights over the course of over a year. Things slowed down a bit in 2023, but even so, these paintings formed a giant mosiac paint wall in the living room of my apartment.
Overall, I’m up to 57 total paintings (2 not pictured as they’re on the second wall) from 20+ people. I’ve told people they’re free to take paintings home, but that they should leave the first one here and come back for it when they paint the second one. This strategy has been successful in having every single painting left here as part of the paint wall.
When people join for paint night, it’s pretty unstructured, so everyone can paint what they’d like, whether that means following a video, using a picture, or just painting from imagination. As a result, we have a fantastic diversity of subjects and styles! There was only one paint night where multiple people followed the same video, though I did my best to arrange those three paintings far from each other. See if you can spot them!
One of my favorite paintings I’ve done is Ocean in a Drop. I started by following a tutorial on painting a water drop, then added a whale along with a school of small red fish. One detail that really helped with the sense of realism was adding slightly offset shadows to the creatures. I posted it on reddit and got a surprisingly positive reception!
Another favorite is Propaganda Poster of a Plush Dino. I hadn’t actually done any dinosaur paintings on this paint wall, so I thought I might as well revisit the old favorite subject. I tried to make the dinosaur fuzzy and 3d to contrast from the bright and flat colors in the background. After painting this, I enjoyed looking back at my 3d dino from my freshman summer series and seeing how much I improved on shading since then!
COMING SOON: I’m going to try to make an interactive version of the paint wall where you can hover over individual paintings and see a blown up image + artist creds. I’ll likely publish this as a separate post!