This was my first experience doing a group "wine and painting" event. I had seen several of my friends participate in them before and it looked like a good time, so I was really looking forward to a night of wine and fun with 7 of my friends.
I paid $35 for my ticket. (So just between my friends and me, we spent $280. And there were at least 30 total people at this class, which means that over $1,000 was brought in by Wine & Canvas for the evening.) The actual NAME of this business is "Wine & Canvas" so - silly me - I assumed that my money was paying for wine and an instruction for a canvas painting. Nope! No wine included! Not even one glass of cheap wine, which would cost them almost nothing to purchase in bulk. All 8 of the people in our group were under that same impression, so we were obviously disappointed. Their answer when we asked about it was, "No wine is included. 'Wine & Canvas' means you are welcome to BUY your own wine from the restaurant while we do the painting." Ummm...what? I refused to order anything from the restaurant where it was held out of sheer spite, since I already paid $35 for a painting that I had to make myself.
I probably would have eventually gotten over the lack of wine if the girls running the event weren't so rude. There were 2 Wine & Canvas employees there: the artist who was instructing us in the painting, and another worker to facilitate things.
First of all, this artist HATED the fact that she had to teach a bunch of non-professional artists how to make a painting. Every time one of us asked a question to make sure we understood how to do it correctly, she didn't even attempt to hide her disdain. She hated us and was totally annoyed the whole time. And she was going SO fast that half the class was completely behind and couldn't keep up with her. We were missing steps and confused about which color went where. And here is the worst part: the painting we were doing was moonlight reflecting over some water with hills and trees, etc. The day after the event, I was showing the painting to a co-worker of mine and she said, "Where is all that light supposed to be coming from? There is no moon." So I went back to the Wine & Canvas website to look at the painting I signed up for and there is definitely a moon in that original painting. This instructor completely forgot to have us paint the moon...so now I don't even want to hang it anywhere so no one else notices and makes me look like an idiot.
The other girl who was facilitating the event didn't want to be there any more than the artist did. There was a lot of color mixing to do for this particular painting, and when someone asked her for another paper plate because they ran out of room to mix, her response was, "Everyone gets one plate." Call me crazy, but if I am paying $35 for something called 'wine & canvas' that doesn't include wine, I think I should be entitled to an extra paper plate if I need it. Later, someone else asked for fresh water to clean their brushes out. This time her response was, "We use the same water throughout the class." And there was no way we could get up and use the restaurant's bathroom to get clean water ourselves, because the instructor was going so fast we would have missed half the painting if we walked away for 5 minutes.
Overall, I was extremely disappointed in how Wine & Canvas runs their events. First and most importantly, their name is misleading and should be changed. In the interest of full truth, if you poke around their website a lot, you will find something in tiny print that says alcohol is not included. But why would I even think to look for that with a name like Wine & Canvas? And if you are not going to give me alcohol, you should have very pleasant, patient and helpful employees, which they don't.
I will not be doing this again. If you choose to try a wine and painting event, I strongly suggest you try a different company. read more