An Emotional Colourful War | 23rd September 2011 | 23:36 PDT

I'm with 6 other people wearing what appears to the untrained eye, basic white long sleeve baby onesie for adults. We're standing in a room that looks as if there has been a gang war amongst the different colours of the rainbow and has resulted in Red grabbing Blue and Yellow and going kamikaze by letting off a big grenade blowing everyone into smithereens, splattering their tiny remains everywhere. The whole thing resembles a bad CSI.

This is a Splatter Party, an artistic night out designed for young children, but seeing as adults are better at being kids than kids are, we threw them out and gave them marching orders to go to the pub and drink, like all adolescences their age should be doing.

Drink it up little Johnny! (via phoenixnewtimes.com)

What happens first at this party, is you all go into this closed area to have a small war between each other, like a pain free paintball session, where you throw lots of paint at each other using whatever you can, brushes, syringes, hands, pots, mouth. Sometimes it might accidentally hit a canvas. It would stop being known as collateral damage when someone would stop for a moment and go “Wow, that looks pretty good” before throwing a tub of brown paint at your face and decorate it with pink war stripes.

We called a ceasefire, as we all had to put our newly acquired skills towards a more productive use and work as a team! A large carpet sized canvas that dominated most of the floor was laid out in front of us and in the distance a starter pistol was fired, emotional anarchy followed.

The collective collaboration of creativity was chucked onto this canvas and paint descended onto the it like a headless horseman was riding Big Bird with a stomach problem after eating too many rainbows.

There was laughter, crying, hugging, throwing, cries of “I hate you mother, why did you make me clean my room!” and “I love you, I'm sorry, I take it ALL back!”, experimenting, artistic board meetings with beard stroking “mmmm, it's good but it's missing something... ORANGE! We need orange on this RIGHT NOW!” and mature act of painting penises on each other.

Now, we're just going to draw a happy little penis over it (via wikimedia.org)

We delved into each other's minds to make a final decision that we had expressed ourselves enough and it felt right to stop. We were done, art had been made and in the distance a chequered flag fired. I never knew art was so difficult and this was meant for kids?!

I was left emotionally elated by the whole experience like I'd been in a trance and went into my very being, I went so deep in my soul and left exhausted as I made it through the dark tunnel of obscure thought and living like I had done an 8 hour mind hike to the top of my inner cerebral Everest, so I had a beer and I felt human again.

Concluding thought: Ear full of paint.