Women of the UK, brace yourselves. As springtime approaches, we are hurtling into one of the most financially and emotionally draining portions of the year: hen-do season. It’s a time to live, laugh and love. A time to resign yourself to wearing a comedy sash. And a time to sit in the basement of an underwhelming bar and attempt to drunkenly paint a masterpiece while a disgruntled, mic-ed up art student shouts step-by-step instructions into your headset.
If you’ve attended any sort of hen event over the past few years, you will be all too familiar with the concept of “paint and sip”, which has somehow become a ubiquitous and vaguely gendered way to socialise in the years since the pandemic. As a trend, it pre-dates 2020, but I’m convinced that the boom in paint-by-numbers kits during lockdown has a lot to answer for in terms of priming us for the peak paint-and-sip era in which we now find ourselves.
The idea is simple. You’re presented with a blank canvas, a palette and some splodges of acrylic, then guided through the process of recreating a painting that’s been slapped all over the event’s marketing material, all while knocking back a few wines.
The pictures are designed to be easy enough to be accessible but just about zeitgeisty enough to look good on social media. Scroll through the listings and you will see Aperol-spritz-themed inspiration images, along with Matisse-style abstract flowers, and wine bottles depicted in the style of your favourite Instagram artist. Mamma Mia!-inspired images seem to be particularly popular, too, in a canny bit of cross-pollination (girls, and I say this from the bottom of my heart, just wanna think about ABBA at all times).
It’s not just bars that are offering them. Cafés and restaurants host them as well, with Galentine’s Day (the celebration of female friendship that is now celebrated the day before Valentine’s) and Mother’s Day acting as a sort of early warm-up for hen-do season.
They’ve become such a fixture for hens, I reckon, because it’s a little bit edgier than pottery painting, another inescapable crafty trend seemingly precision-engineered to appeal to large groups of women and to fill our shelves with tat, but not as “out there” as life drawing (although you’ll be glad to hear some companies do offer vaguely “sexy” prompt images). They are a crowdpleaser, in the sense that they are so inoffensive that even the fussiest maid of honour would struggle to come up with a reason to properly veto them.
As a particularly ominous addendum, many events include a warning that you must take your finished picture home once the session has finished. It’s the sort of admonition that clearly stems from experience (probably of a rowdy gang of penis-straw-waving huns forgetting to pick up their paintings before being frogmarched to the next stop on the itinerary by a particularly terrifying bridesmaid). If a disclaimer imploring you not to cast aside your artwork moments after completion isn’t a winning endorsement, then I don’t know what is.
They aren’t exclusive to pre-wedding celebrations, though. I’ve seen adverts for networking paint-and-sips for arty girlbosses. Paint-and-sips prefixed by a pilates class, where the drinking is very much of the iced matcha variety. Mother-and-baby fingerpaint-and-sips. The possible contexts in which you can paint and sip are seemingly endless – if you’re prepared to hand over the requisite cash. And painting and sipping doesn’t come cheap.
In Liverpool, the city where I’m based – which also happens to be one of this nation’s hen-do capitals – the cost of the average paint-and-sip shindig tends to hover around the £40 mark. Meanwhile, in London, the capital city premium means that handing over £50 for two hours of sub-par sploshing around with acrylics isn’t uncommon.
These prices, I should add, don’t tend to actually include the drinks you’ll be sipping on, so that’s an additional expense – one that also allows you to experience the chastening sensation of queueing up for a gin and tonic in some anonymous chain bar while wearing a branded apron. Unless, of course, you’ve opted for a slightly pricier bottomless-brunch-style package, promising unlimited prosecco in an unholy fusion of two hen-friendly activities.
Perhaps the free-flowing fizz stimulates creative sensibilities. Perhaps it makes you exponentially more likely to accidentally dip your paint brush into your drink, and dye it some radioactive shade of pink.
The pictures are designed to be easy enough to be accessible but just about zeitgeisty enough to look good on social media
What’s arguably more alarming is the way that paint and sip seems to have made ingress into the dating landscape. Thanks to the nefarious and all-pervasive influence of Organised Fun, sitting down for a drink has been deemed, in some quarters at least, to be too stilted a way to get to know someone. Instead, we should all be throwing axes, playing adventure golf, completing puzzles in escape rooms or, in this case, showing off our artistic skills by copying a printout of a Santorini-esque blue dome swaddled in bougainvillea.
Is paint and sip a dating red flag? I couldn’t possibly say, though I will put forward the tentative theory that it tends to be suggested by the sort of bloke who wants you to think he’s a sensitive, thoughtful type who listened really carefully to your comments about wanting to get off your phone and be more creative… but then planned your date using some lowest-common-denominator suggestions from ChatGPT.
Then there’s the question of what you do with your masterpiece once you’re done. Toting a damp painting around a city centre on a Saturday night isn’t massively conducive to romance (oh, I would try to hold your hand, but alas, it’s gripped around the edges of an A4 canvas!).
And what about when you’re done done, and you’re left with a naff piece of “art” that only brings back memories of an equally naff relationship? In the process of writing this, I was reminded of one such unloved dating relic that’s still lurking face-down underneath a cupboard, where it continues to fester, exuding bad vibes, like the portrait of Dorian Gray for the Hinge era.
But whether or not your finished picture reminds you of failed forays into dating apps, once the booze-induced buzz wears off, the chances are high that you’ll be left with a poorly executed picture of, say, a croissant – and one that you have precisely zero desire to display on your walls for public consumption. It’s the visual equivalent of a hangover that never leaves – and who wants that?
So if you’ve been conscripted for bridesmaid duty this summer, spare a thought for your cynical and creatively challenged hens. Just book the bottomless brunch instead, no aprons required.