Host a Paint and Sip at Your Pub or Hotel

Two good nights, and five ordinary ones

Friday and Saturday look after themselves. The doors open, the regulars arrive, the bar runs hot and nobody thinks very hard about it. Then Sunday winds down and the week starts again.

Monday to Wednesday is a different business. The bistro carries the load, the schnitzel special does its job, and the bar barely ticks over. You have a duty manager on, a bartender polishing glasses that are already clean, and a room doing nothing except costing you to light it. The takings are not terrible. They are just thin, and thin in the highest margin part of the venue.

Most fixes for a quiet Tuesday ask something of the kitchen. A promotion on parmys, two for one on mains, a set menu for a group. All of it drags work into the back of house for a margin you were not chasing, on a night you wanted the bar busy instead.

Paint Juicy fills the room on a night you were not going to fill, with a crowd that is there to drink, talk and stay put for three hours. Your kitchen does not have to know it is happening.

What the arrangement is, in plain terms

No venue fee. No commission. No hire charge. The pub pays nothing, and that is not an introductory rate, it is how the whole thing works.

The guests pay us. Every seat is a ticket, and that ticket is where our money comes from. Public sessions are $59 AUD a head, bottomless sessions are $99 AUD a head and are strictly 18+. Private bookings run at $700 AUD flat for the first 10 guests, then $65 AUD per additional guest, with a minimum of 10 paid seats. Because the guests pay us, we do not need to charge you, and we are not asking for a cut of the bar.

Your side of it is the room and the bar. That is the whole list. We bring everything else. Ticket sales, the marketing and advertising, customer service, the host artist, the PA, every art material, the full setup and the full pack down. There are no travel fees inside our service regions, which cover Queensland, New South Wales and the Northern Territory.

Paint Juicy is 100% mobile. There is no studio behind this and no home venue we would rather be at. Your room is the studio for the night, then it is your room again.

Bar trade, without touching the kitchen

This is the part that matters most to a pub, so here it is properly. A paint and sip is a drinks night, not a food night dressed up as one. The revenue it puts through your till is bar revenue, and it lands without adding a single job to the back of house.

Nothing lands on the pass

There is no menu attached to this. No platters to build, no grazing boards, no set course, no dietary sheet arriving the week before with fourteen amendments on it. Nobody is asking your chef to cost a group menu at a price that barely works, or asking you to roster a second hand on the line for a Tuesday.

If your bistro is open and guests decide to eat before things kick off, that is money in your till and we are delighted for you. Either way it is your call, it is never a condition, and we will never build a session that leans on your kitchen.

That distinction is the whole point. Food revenue costs you food cost, prep hours and wages before you see a cent of it. Bar revenue does not carry that weight, and you already have the staff behind the taps.

Three hours, seated, and in no hurry

The spend pattern is the useful bit. These are not people who put their head in, have one and leave. They have bought a ticket, organised the group and found a park, and they are staying for the duration.

They order on arrival, because that is what you do when you sit down with your friends. The session then runs in layers, the paint has to dry between them, and guests naturally wander back to the bar while it does. Plenty stay on at the end with a canvas propped against the table leg, because nobody wants to be first to call it.

We will not put a number on what that is worth. It depends on your prices, your crowd and your room, and any figure we invented would be worthless to you. What it is, is three hours of seated trade on a night your bar was quiet.

Your roster does not change

Your staff do nothing different. They pour drinks, run the register and clear glasses. Nobody has to learn a format, hold a microphone or mind a sign in sheet. There is no briefing to sit through and no extra shift to fill, unless you look at the bookings and decide to put a second person on the taps.

Setup and pack down are ours. Paint, easels, aprons, canvases, cloths, PA, the lot. The room is back exactly as we found it, and your close is your normal close.

If you want the long version of how a partnership runs from first conversation to the night itself, it is set out on our full guide to hosting a paint and sip at your venue.

Who brings what

Who actually walks in

The crowd is women, aged anywhere from 30 to 90, with the biggest group between 35 and 65. They come in twos, fours and sixes. Birthdays, hens nights, work teams, book groups, mums who have been trying to lock in a date since March.

For a pub, that is a useful group to have in on a Tuesday. They are early, so they are seated and ordering while your bar would otherwise be idle. They are loud in the good way, which makes a quiet room look like a night out to anyone walking past your windows. Not a difficult crowd, not a late crowd, and gone at a civilised hour.

A fair few have never set foot in your venue before, and they are the group most likely to say "we should do this again" before the first drink is finished.

Most sessions are 18+. Some are open to 12+ with a paying guardian present at all times, and bottomless sessions are strictly 18+. Every listing carries the age restriction, so there are no surprises at your door.

Paint Juicy has hosted more than 42,000 guests, holds 4.9 stars on Google and has been recognised as a Best of Queensland Experience every year since 2022. You can see the sort of nights we run on the Queensland paint and sip events calendar.

"We already do trivia on a Tuesday"

Fair enough, and trivia works. It is cheap to run, it is reliable, and a good host with a following will hold a room week after week. We are not going to tell you it does not earn its keep, because plenty of publicans will tell you otherwise and they are right.

It is a different crowd and a different spend pattern, that is all.

Trivia is mostly your existing regulars, rearranged into teams. It is free to enter, so the room fills on the night or it does not, and you find out at seven o'clock. The spend is thin across a big table and the whole thing turns over in about two hours.

A paint and sip is a ticketed event. The seats are sold before the night, so you know well ahead whether the room is full, and the people in it made a plan to come to your pub specifically, rather than being there already. They are seated for three hours rather than two, drinking wine and spritzes rather than schooners, and they are largely people who are not on your Tuesday list.

The two are not in competition either. Trivia sits on one night and a paint and sip sits on another, or once a month, or once a quarter while you see how it goes. Some run trivia on the Tuesday and put us on the Wednesday, which was the deadest night in the building.

If your trivia night is packing the place out, keep it. This is for the other four nights.

Questions publicans ask

Have a look at your Tuesday

If there is a night where the bistro is doing the work and the bar is not, that is the night worth talking about. We will look at your room, tell you honestly whether it suits, and if it does we will put a date up and start selling seats.

Running a smaller bar with no function space, or a hotel with a room you hire out? The same offer applies, with more detail for licensed bars hosting a paint and sip and for function spaces hosting a paint and sip. Not sure which one you are? Start at the partner with Paint Juicy venue directory.

Trent & James