Saturday, February 27, 2010

Creative Date Nights

Mr. J and I instituted date night in our relationship at about the 1 year mark. We were both serious about each other, living separately, and both uber busy with work, school, and other priorities. We didn't have a specific date night, we just looked at our schedules every week and chose a new day to have quality time.

After we moved in together, we kept date night. Especially because I'm a night owl and Mr. J is a morning person...so we were basically watching each other sleep throughout the week. Our date nights were pretty standard, go to a restaurant and make googly eyes at each other, go to a movie and hold hands, or go to hear live music and sing together. I read an article in the New York Times a while ago, "Reinventing Date Night for Long-Married Couples." I think this article is important, not just for long-married couples, but for all couples. The main thing I took away was that by learning something together as a couple, you can strengthen your bond.

Because it's freezing cold and we've been snowed in--Mr. J and I have to be really creative having date night at home and not falling into the rut of Netflix and dinner :) For our last date night we got really creative and decided to paint portraits of each other to hang in our bedroom. We both are creative, but we haven't painted a picture since watercolors in kindergarten. We went to an art store after work, picked up our supplies, got some takeout and wine. We were painting until about 3 a.m. (almost done!).

We learned that we've both got some skillz, y'all! We both can already draw, but it was hard to execute our sketches into paintings. We also bought two smaller canvases so that we can eventually paint our two cats and have a whole family portrait wall. We're planning on taking a painting class together during the summer when Mr. J has summer vacation and things are slower for me at work. I can't wait!

Check out our paintings! Keep in mind that we're not completely done yet. (I need to make Mr. J's teeth look less like Chiclets and he needs to give me a nose!) ***And please forgive me for the large photos, I'll resize photos moving forward, too lazy now :)

First time painting: Success!

Babe, where's my nose?

We based our portraits on this photo of us
taken by Richard Louissaint.

What creative date nights have you had? Do you have any more creative ideas for us? Share!

4 comments:

(JIN) Love, Loss & Lacquer said...

Oh my gosh what I great idea. I never would have thought of this - our date night is the usual dinner and a movie, but this sounds more fun. My husband is not creative at all, so it would be funny to see him paint a portrait of me lol

Rich Louis said...

hahaha cool

Anonymous said...

Indoor candlelight picnic. We did this one year for Valentines Day, complete with homemade gifts. I crocheted a red teddy bear, baked heart shaped cookies from scratch and framed a sexy poem. He made an AMAZING home cooked meal. That was 10 years ago, and we're still going strong. Hooray for Black Love.

Anonymous said...

your portraits are great! You guys are so talented and they actually do look like you two!