Prepare to be splattered–with paint

Holly Chester, Staff Reporter

This upcoming week is bound to be full of stress with finals fast approaching.

Campus Activities is giving students a chance to take a break from studying by hosting GlowRage’s Paint University, otherwise known as Paint U.

Paint U will feature electronic dance music, black lights and an abundant supply of neon paint that will be sprayed into the crowd.

Scott Drummond, director of campus activities, intends for this event to be a good way to shake off winter quarter.

“It’s the last full day of winter quarter, right before finals week, and so we thought it would be a great way to just kind of let it out. We’ll make it fun and loud and kinda messy, and let people just come and dance it out and get ready for finals week,” Drummond said. “Winter is also a tough quarter. People feel almost kind of compressed because of the weather. It’s grey out. It’s rainy and snowy and cold so you feel just kind of heavy, so we wanted to do something that would be fun.”

The event is taking place in the SURC ballroom, which will be transformed into a venue that is suited for a paint party.

“For lack of a better term, we’ll shrink-wrap the room,” Drummond said.

While the ballroom will be protected from the paint, the team putting this together encourages the party-goers to come dressed in all white in order to get the full paint experience. The Activities Center made sure that the paint is safe for clothing and skin, meaning it shouldn’t stain.

“It’s an interesting paint. We actually tested it. We put it on our skin, we put it on clothing and checked it. It just kind of goes away…It’s very hypoallergenic,” Drummond said. “We just got a delivery of several gallons of hot pink and hot yellow paints. They actually have paint guns like those guns you’d see at a water park.”

Alyssia Ready, senior event planning major, has been a part of the process of bringing Paint U to Central.

“When they come in, they pretty much wrap everything floor to ceiling,” Ready said. “There will be about three people that are on stage shooting people with paint cannons and people in the crowd that are shooting people with paint and there’s a DJ. It’s pretty crazy, but it’s going to be a good time.”

Campus Activities is excited about this concert because they have been working on bringing it to Central for a little over a year.

“The first encounter with Paint U was actually last year at a conference in Portland. We got the idea that we’d like to do it then, but it just didn’t work for our timing so this year we went with the idea that we would look specifically at them… we already knew that Friday, March 11, was our date,” Drummond said. “We thought ‘well let’s give this a try and see how it goes’.”

According to Ready, there is more information about the paint party on Central’s Campus Activities page on Facebook along with videos of past paint parties that GlowRage has hosted.

“It’s important to have a stress reliever, and I think this is a unique way to relieve your stress during finals week, and it’s fun,” Ready said. “ I think it’s going to be a really big hit.”