Day 3: Bob Ross Experiment

So while talking to my mom on the phone in Target about my upcoming internship and how excited I am, she starts busting up laughing. Mom, what are you doing? In between laughing she tells me she’s reading my blog about my first day of painting. I tell her oh, yeah what I painted is horrible and she blurts out, “There’s pictures?!?” So we start talking about my day some more and then she starts to crack up again and says, “I figured out how to get the pictures to load…”

I love my mom, she’s such a dork. Now I’m okay with my mom laughing at my failure because the only thing funnier than me trying to paint with Bob Ross is maybe my mom trying to paint with Bob Ross. I get my excellent hand eye coordination from her.

So afterward I call up my big sis and I tell her how mom thought the paintings were hilarious. My sister being the big sweetheart that she is pulls up my blog and tries to find the good in my paintings. Like that the big triangular thing is definitely a mountain. I love her, but she’s very very wrong about my artistic ability, which I proved today.

So today I managed to kill some happy trees, and make a horrible bush that looks more like the back end of a very fluffy dinosaur if you squint really good.

Okay first off I may have to take longer breaks between painting because this paint takes forever to dry and if I power through like Bob is, my paint just all blends together on the campus into a sort of gray blob.

We started with a bar of land which isn’t quite as distinct as Bob’s but it’s kind of hard to mess up a green horizontal line. He then had me highlight it with yellow which on his painting looks like leaves from far away and mine looks like yellow paint. He then had me pull out the knife and make a back and forth cutting motion with short edge or top of the knife. Okay so for Bob this produced a very nice straight white line which when he went back over it blended and looked like the reflection of the land into the water. For me none of the paint came off the knife. He had me do that same thing where I take the knife and cut the paint so it puts it on the flat end but no paint on the sharp end. So I just jammed the sharp end into the paint and I got a big smeared mess but at least this time there was paint on the canvas.

And then the happy trees and his friends started. I love watching him make these because I loved the idea as a kid that trees could be happy and that they weren’t lonely but got to hang out with their posse. Well my trees ride the short bus to school. I was supposed to take my brush and push up on the corner zigzagging down the trees. The bristles of the brush were too coarse and if I pushed hard enough to get them to bend then it make thick smushes of paint rather than fine green branches hanging off the sides.

So then he says let’s make a bush, and he keeps talking about how we’re going to have to make some decisions now and I wait to here what the options are and nothing happens. Alright Bob I guess you psychically knew I shouldn’t be trusted to make my own decision and took back that offer…

So he starts making the bush and it involves the #1 brush, some green and black paint and more smushing and that’s how the fluffly dinosaur if you squint just right was born. So now looking at my painting I see where the decision was and why he took it back. He meant we’d have to decide where to place the bush so that the trees in the background weren’t levitating but once he realized that way he had placed his bush would blend nicely into the trees he took back his question. However, my trees were placed awkwardly and are made more awkward by their strange ability to float in the air.

Finally, we start to highlight the trees. Bob uses a different technique to highlight his trees with his brush which involves lightly smudging with the very tip of the fan brush alone the branches. A few of my branches actually look like branches except some of those are too long for the tree because the fan brush was too wide.

Now highlighting the bush was a whole other ball park. It looks like my dinosaur has a weird growth all over him. Just look at the picture. It’s self explanatory.

And the last thing we did was blend the bottom of the bush into the water to create a reflection. This is where I decided I need to stop and let the paint dry in between steps. When I tried to blend I found I had too much paint and it didn’t blend so much as just smear paint around. Also, the # 2 brush I’m supposed to blend with is again too stiff and too thick to blend properly.

What my painting should look like by now:

Bob Ross Experiment: Day 2 and 1/2

Okay so they included with the kit what your picture should look like when done. So I now have my goal. I’ll be sure to post updates with my painting next to the end product. In the meantime here’s what I’m shooting for:

Okay just let the pups out to pee so they should be good while I’m painting.

I’m going to do this in 45 min sessions. And here I go!

So the DVD starts out with copyrights in every language basically saying that if you abuse the copyright laws Bob Ross’s evil twin will haunt you forever! And they stay on the screen for longer than normal.

The menu screen has soft jazz which is just so Bob Ross. Alright let’s start my painting tutorial.

OMG!!! I forgot how soothing his voice is.

Ok had to take a break to get my cup with nail polish remover in it since I have no paint thinner. I noticed that Bob’s got more brushes than my kit and that nail polish remover smell will get you high if you don’t use it in a well ventilated area…

So Bob just told me it’s okay if I don’t like my own painting because us artists are too hard on ourselves. Thanks Bob!

Okay he just brought up his step by step instructional booklet. I looked at it and he’s right it is very succinct and helpful but the photographs included are thumb nails and in black and white so are not useful at all. Sorry Bob your publisher sucked.

Another thing I forgot about is how simple he makes it all look. I’m getting so excited!!! Can’t wait to get through this instructional part and start painting.

My artists out there,  just noticed that Bob has the creepy cocaine pinky nail. Is there a painting reason for this?

Okay so Bob starts off my lesson with the liquid white base coat on the canvas; his canvas is already prepped which means I have to hurry up and prep mine!!!! So I prep mine and I try and keep the coat light and evenly distributed like Bob does and I think I did a pretty good job (sorry no picture, hard to see any difference with white on white).

I also prepped the ottoman…

So Bob immediately jumps into painting our sky. So I have to hurry and get my palette set up. So far he’s just using the phthalo blue and the midnight black. He blends those together and makes a crisscrossing x across the stop half of the canvas and then blends them by doing long strokes horizontally across the canvas. Okay so this isn’t going so badly. I can make X’s and blend with my #2 brush just like Bob (the big painter’s looking brush). However, he then has me make the water. I do this by making short horizontal strokes starting from the bottom and going up to make the color lighter. I notice he leaves a white space between the sky and the ocean.

This is where things start to go wrong…My canvas isn’t as large as Bob’s. They’re close but not quite the same. So after I’ve pretty much done the whole ocean he mentions that we’re leaving the middle blank. So I manage to get a small inch long blank space between the right and left sides but once he has me blend, it’s pretty much gone.

So Bob cleans his brushes and smacks them against his easel to dry them. I mimic Bob and paint sprays everywhere. My clean cream couch is now cream and blue speckled. So without thinking I brace myself on my couch to try and position myself better to multi task while painting and I forget my palm is covered in paint,so now my couch has a huge blue stain on it.

So then the fluffy clouds start. He tells me to use that same #2 brush and just push with a corner and make clouds where ever I feel like it and to give that cloud some friends. So I switch to the #1 brush because my canvas is smaller and the #2 brush is caked in blue paint I can’t get off.

Well I think when I was blending the blue sky I was also supposed to be putting some pressure to get the extra paint off because now there’s too much blue in my clouds as I try to make them. They aren’t so much clouds as white highlighting.  So then to make them fluffy I’m supposed to do an upward sweeping motion. This results in marbled blue skies instead of any clouds. I’ve blended my clouds into obscurity. Ugh…

So the last thing I managed to do was the mountain range. We mixed a blue that’s not in my kit (so I used the phthalo blue again), midnight black, and alizarin crimson. The crimson color is really really pretty. Anyway, I’m supposed to use the knife to blend the three, make a very flat line of goop then cut it in half to get a small line of paint on the knife. Okay so I actually manage to do this. You don’t need to make it super flat, in fact on the wooden palette if you do, it gets completely absorbed so there’s no paint to cut. Okay so I’m supposed to basically push upward then drag down to make an upside down V. He keeps talking about a strong outline but again there’s so much paint on my canvas that when I put that much pressure on the canvas to apply the paint I end up scraping off excess blue sky paint instead of applying mountain paint. So I stop doing that and with light pressure apply the mountain paint. Again my colors aren’t as true because they are blue tinted. So again I blend and it doesn’t look too bad when it’s blended. But then we start the shading.

Okay this is the point where I swear to God, Bob Ross is somehow magical. Again we’re using titanium white and the knife to make the highlight. We’re supposed to apply it as lightly as a whisper. Bob says this analogy helped his friend to paint magnificent mountain ranges, but it doesn’t help me out much. I’m applying it as lightly as I can without not applying any paint at all and I’m not getting the really pretty marbled effect he is. He then has me use the #2(#1 in my case) brush to tap lightly to shadow. I’m supposed to use white for lighter places and blue-ish white for the darker side of the mountain range. My taping looks like fuzzy mountains…. His looks like shadows… Then we blend and his look likes beautiful mountain ranges with peaks and snow and shadows. Mine looks like picasso stole my brushes and painted crazy mountains for me.

And my timer went off letting me know that’s all the time I had for today.

So the conclusion for today is that Bob Ross is magic because I listened and rewound each step at least 5 times to make sure I was clear on how to apply the paint to the brush, then the paint to the canvas, and rewatched to make sure I had the technique right but he still managed to do things with his brushes that I can’t even begin to figure out. And secondly I’m making an abstract painting against my will. I really want to make a realistic landscape but it’s not really happening.

(what my painting should look like at this point)

I really hope that when we get to the happy trees I don’t screw them up. The happy trees were always my favorite part of watching Bob Ross paint.

And I’m covered in paint!

Bob Ross Experiment: Day Two

Okay so after making some coffee soap I decided I’d break open the Bob Ross kit and take a look inside:

Okay here’s my take on the kit. The wooden box is actually really nice and once the supplies are gone I can use it for something else. Don’t know what but I don’t want it going to waste.I have no idea about oil paints so I can’t judge but I’ll give you my take on it after I’ve painted some stuff.

The paint brushes aren’t  great but they aren’t that cheap black synthetic crap that you find in crayola kits. The paperwork that came with the kit says that the brushes are natural bristle brushes but they feel like higher quality synthetic stuff. Bob even says that they’re ox tail brushes in the video but they are too cheap feeling to have actually come from an animal. Maybe when he was alive the quality of his kits were better. I really love Bob Ross so I’m going to assume he provided quality supplies and only after he died did the company who produces the Bob Ross supplies turned to cheaper quality materials.

Okay so the palette… I’m glad it’s large and that one came with the kit….but it’s wood. Now if you haven’t dealt with wood much you might not know but wood is incredibly porous so it sucks up paint. So since the surface isn’t as fused as plastic or metal it’s going to take way more paint to blend colors. Ugh! Oh well I’m sticking with the experiment and using the equipment they gave me in the kit.

Also, I didn’t get any paint thinner, so I’m going to improvise and try nail polish remover…

So let’s end this review of the kit on a high note. All this stuff was made in USA. Go Bob Ross, helping the economy even from the grave. I salute you sir.