Paint the Town Has Always Painted Alpharetta in May. This Year It Paints October.

Arts Alpharetta's plein air competition has run five times, and every one of those weeks fell in May. The sixth runs October 20 through 24, 2026, which makes it the festival's first fall edition.

Paint the Town artists set up outdoors and paint the places residents pass every week, and a painting judged on Saturday night may have been finished outside that same day. Every painting the festival has produced so far shows Alpharetta in spring. Next week, its artists paint the town in fall for the first time.

Five springs of easels, one fall

The festival started as a five-day invitational in 2021 and kept its May slot for five straight years.

Arts Alpharetta hasn't published a reason for the move, and the festival is still run the same way. The organization hosts it with the City of Alpharetta and the Alpharetta Convention and Visitors Bureau, and the AJC covered the first edition when it launched in 2021.

What the spring paintings captured

The best evidence that Paint the Town paints everyday Alpharetta is the list of last year's winners. Arts Alpharetta's 2025 festival page shows these in the Professional category:

• 1st Place: Stephanie Amato, "On the Rocks"
• 2nd Place: Susan Waters, "Greenway Creek"
• 3rd Place and Best Use of Light: Rebecca Postell, "Sundrenched Morning"
• Honorable Mention: Keith Burgess, "Lunch at Avalon"
• Honorable Mention: John Firth, "Rock Bridge"
• Honorable Mention: Rachel Eichholtz, "Rhododendron Blooms"

A creek along the greenway, a lunch crowd at Avalon, rhododendrons in bloom. These are scenes a resident might pass on any spring weekday, and that's the point. The 2025 awards went to more than $4,000 in prizes across Professional, Intermediate and Novice categories.

Rhododendrons in bloom is a May subject. So is a sun-drenched morning painted in the second week of May. Five years of entries were made in the same few weeks of the year, so the festival's archive shows one season of Alpharetta over and over. October artists will be working with different trees, a different angle of sun, and evenings that get dark earlier.

How the week runs, day by day

The festival runs Tuesday through Saturday, rain or shine. Artists may work in oil, acrylic, watercolor, pastel, gouache, charcoal and other portable media, and every surface has to be stamped at the Alpharetta Arts Center at 238 Canton Street before painting starts. The stamp is how the competition confirms that each piece was painted during the festival week.

Arts Alpharetta calls the schedule tentative, so check the Paint the Town 2026 page before planning around a specific hour. As published, it runs like this:

1. Tuesday, October 20, through Friday, October 23: Daytime location painting. Artists check in at the Arts Center and fan out across town.
2. Any evening, October 20–23, 6 p.m. to sundown: Art in the Dark, a separate competition for paintings made as the light fades.
3. Friday, October 23, 9–11 a.m.: Quick Draw. Artists get two hours to finish a piece, with judging at 11:30 a.m. on the Town Green at City Center.
4. Saturday, October 24, 10:30 a.m.: The deadline for artists to deliver their finished work.
5. Saturday, October 24, 5–7 p.m.: Awards ceremony and exhibition reception at the Arts Center.
6. October 24 through November 14: The exhibition hangs at the Arts Center.

The space between items four and five is the shortest in the schedule. Paintings delivered Saturday morning are judged and hung by that evening, and some of them may have been started on Friday's Quick Draw lawn or during Thursday's Art in the Dark session.

Art in the Dark wasn't added for the move. The 2025 winners' gallery already includes Art in the Dark awards. What changes in October is the window itself. A 6 p.m. start in late October lands much closer to dusk than a 6 p.m. start in May did, so evening painters will likely have less light to work with.

Where to find artists at work

There's no fixed route. The Awesome Alpharetta festival page says artists will paint at Alpharetta City Center, local parks, gardens and other locations, and that spots change through the week. In practice, an easel could show up almost anywhere in town.

Sources differ slightly on daytime hours. Appen Media's October roundup lists painting from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. daily and calls the festival free to attend. The Awesome Alpharetta event listing gives 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Either way, the painting happens during ordinary daytime hours, when errands and lunch breaks are already taking people around town.

Here are three of the most reliable places to start:

• The Alpharetta Arts Center, 238 Canton Street. Artists check in and have surfaces stamped here, so it's the festival's hub all week.
• The Town Green at City Center on Friday morning. It's where Quick Draw paintings are judged at 11:30 a.m., right after the two-hour sprint ends.
• After 6 p.m., Tuesday through Friday. Art in the Dark entrants work from 6 p.m. until sundown, at locations that haven't been published.

Arts Alpharetta's call for artists describes the festival as held almost entirely outdoors, with artists painting live on location for all five days. It also notes that many visiting artists stay in town for several days.

Saturday night and the three weeks after

The 2026 call advertises more than $3,000 in cash awards. Prizes go to Professional, Intermediate and Novice categories, plus the Quick Draw and Art in the Dark competitions. The Novice category means the field isn't limited to touring professionals, and some of the canvases will come from people still learning the form.

The festival is also listed with a Wet Paint Tent Sale, where pieces from the week are offered for sale. As of now, no 2026 date, time or location for the sale has been published. Keep an eye on Arts Alpharetta's page as the week gets closer.

For anyone who misses the easels, the exhibition at the Arts Center runs through November 14. That gives you three weeks to see the finished October paintings indoors, and possibly to spot a corner of downtown you walked past that week.

The Arts Center's next date on the calendar

Arts Alpharetta's next public event is just a week after the exhibition comes down. The Holiday Artists Market opens to the public on Saturday, November 21, from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the Alpharetta Arts Center. An invitation-only VIP preview is set for November 20, from 4 to 6 p.m. After that, the organization's "Wonder" exhibition runs November 24, 2026, through January 9, 2027, with a reception on Friday, December 4, from 5 to 7 p.m.

When a painter sets up across from a favorite lunch spot or a stretch of greenway, it shows how much character those everyday places carry. At The Chatham Co., our family has watched North Fulton grow since 1948, and we love seeing those places turned into art. If you'd like to talk about the streets and corners of Alpharetta that matter most to your family, we'd be glad to sit down with you. Schedule a Personal Consultation.