How Hosting a Paint and Sip at Your Venue Works

Free sounds like a catch, so let us deal with that first

You have heard a version of this pitch before. Somebody wants your room on a quiet night. They promise a crowd, they use the word partnership, and then somewhere in the third paragraph there is a fee, a minimum spend, a revenue split, or a line about you covering the promotion. By the time the real number surfaces you have already given up twenty minutes you did not have.

So when you read that hosting a Paint Juicy night at your venue costs you nothing, the sensible reaction is to go looking for where the cost is hiding. Good. Look for it. It is a short search, because the answer sits in one sentence.

Paint Juicy is paid by the guests, not by the venue. Every person in that room bought a ticket before they walked through your door. The venue is not the customer. The guests are.

A public session ticket is $59 AUD a head. That ticket covers the host artist, every art material, the sound gear, the advertising, the ticketing and the customer service. It is a complete business on its own, and it is funded entirely by the people painting. Because the guests already pay for the night, there is nothing left for the venue to be charged for. No venue fee. No commission. No hire charge. Not a discounted one, not a trial one, not one that appears at session three.

What the venue gets is the bar. Forty to eighty people arrive in the early evening, stay for about three hours, and buy their drinks from you across the whole of it. Those takings are yours in full. That is the venue's return, it is the only return either side has designed for, and it is the reason the arrangement holds up without money changing hands between us.

The three things managers assume are the catch

"You will want a minimum spend guarantee." No. You are not asked to guarantee a bar spend, a headcount, or a dollar figure of any kind. There is nothing to sign that puts you on the hook if a night is quieter than either of us hoped.

"You will take a cut of the bar." No. Bar takings are not split, not reported to us, and not part of the arrangement. We do not ask what you took. It is your bar, your tills, your money.

"You will bill for the extras." No. There is no setup charge, no equipment hire, no cleaning fee and no travel fee anywhere in our Queensland, New South Wales and Northern Territory service regions. Paint Juicy is 100% mobile, there is no studio anywhere, so travelling to a venue is not an extra service. It is the only way we operate.

Who does what

The split is deliberately lopsided, and it is lopsided in your favour. You supply two things. We supply everything else. Here it is laid out so there is no guessing later.

The line that matters most to a manager is this one. Your staff do nothing different. No briefing, no run sheet to follow, no extra hands rostered on to help us. They pour drinks, they clear glasses, they close the till at the end. If your bar team never learns the difference between a Paint Juicy night and any other busy evening, we have done our job properly.

What a first session actually looks like

From the outside this can feel like a lot of moving parts landing in your venue on a night you are responsible for. It is worth walking through the shape of it, start to finish, so you know what you are agreeing to before you agree to it.

1. The first conversation

It is a phone call, and it is short. We ask what your quiet night is, roughly how many people you can seat at tables, and whether the bar is yours. You ask us whatever you like. Nobody arrives with a folder, and there is no second meeting to schedule before anything can happen. Most venues know inside ten minutes whether this is worth a date.

2. Picking the date and the theme

You nominate a night that suits your trade, and we work to it rather than the other way around. Then we choose a theme together. Our nights are built around music and nostalgia, so the options run from 80s and 90s to ABBA, Aussie rock, movie magic and a bottomless brunch session for the 18+ crowd. Some themes suit some rooms better than others, and we will say so.

3. Selling the tickets

This part is entirely ours. We build the event, put the tickets on sale, promote it, and answer every question that comes in from a guest. You are welcome to share it with your own audience, and plenty of venues do, but nothing is asked of you and nothing depends on it. If a guest rings your venue confused about the booking, the answer is always the same, send them to us.

4. The night itself

We arrive well ahead of the guests and set the room up ourselves. Guests turn up in the early evening, in groups, in a good mood, and they head to the bar before they sit down. The session runs about three hours. There is painting, there is a lot of singing, and it is louder and funnier than people expect. Between layers, while the paint dries, guests naturally drift back to the bar. Nobody has to be told to. By the end everyone has a finished canvas they are unreasonably proud of, and a phone full of photographs of your room.

5. The room afterwards

The session finishes and the room is cleared and back to normal shortly after. We pack down everything we brought in, tables go back where they came from, and there is no paint anywhere it should not be. The promise is simple and we have never needed a longer version of it: the room goes back exactly as we found it. Nothing waits for your morning staff.

What happens after the first one

The first session is the test, and both sides are running it. You are finding out what the night does to your bar and how the room copes. We are finding out how your space behaves with a full house in it, where the sound sits, and whether the crowd we bring is the crowd your venue wants.

Afterwards we talk it through honestly. How fast the tickets went, what the room felt like at capacity, whether the layout wants adjusting, whether the night of the week was right. If something did not work, that conversation is where it gets fixed rather than quietly repeated.

Where a room works, the natural next step is a regular slot. A date that recurs is easier for everyone. Guests start telling friends there is a paint night at your venue, your staff stop treating it as an unusual evening, and we can rotate the theme so the same faces have a reason to come back rather than a repeat of what they already painted. Nostalgia is what pulls this audience in, and there is a very deep well of it.

The other thing that tends to follow is private bookings. Once a hens party or a work team has been in your room for a public session, they think of it when they need somewhere for their own. Private sessions run at $700 AUD flat for the first 10 guests, then $65 AUD per additional guest, with a minimum of 10 paid seats, and they follow the same arrangement for the venue. We bring the night, the guests buy their drinks from you.

Who this suits, and who it honestly does not

It would be easy to write that this works anywhere. It does not, and pretending otherwise wastes your afternoon and ours. Here is the honest version.

If you are reading this on behalf of a particular kind of venue, the argument looks a little different depending on the room. There are pages written for pubs and hotels looking at a flat midweek bar, for RSL clubs with a function room that sits unbooked, and for breweries with a taproom that empties out early. If none of those is you, the full list of venue partnership pages will point you at the right one.

Questions venue managers ask