Number 1: Take it slow!

While Bob Ross only takes 30 minutes for every painting he does, us mere mortals can’t expect to do the same.
You can expect a painting to take at least 90 minutes, maybe 60 if you’re going really fast. You’ll probably spend more time mixing colors, trying new techniques, thinking about where to place that next happy little tree, and cleaning your brushes (we seriously believe that we spend around 50% of our painting time with cleaning brushes before we got our cleaning screen) than Bob does. It may also make a difference that Bob Ross painted over 10 000 paintings in his life.

But hey, it’s about the journey and not the destination. Painting is fun and relaxing and we should enjoy every second of it.

 

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Number 2: Thin Paint Sticks To Thick Paint

Bob repeast this in almost every episode of ‘The Joy of Painting’, and it is great advice for all of us mud mixers out there that have problems when putting the highlights on their trees and bushes.
Oil paints are made of two things: pigments and oil, and the more oil there is in a paint, the thinner it gets. And just like very wet stuff that sticks to very dry stuff thin paint sticks to thick paint in much the same manner. You can find more tips on how to do mountains here.

If you ever had the problem that the paint on the canvas mixes with the paint on your brush when doing highlights for your trees and bushes you probably didn’t thin your paint enough. You can do this by dipping your brush into your liquid white or even your paint thinner before mixing the color you want to use for the highlights. If your paint still doesn’t stick, just add a little bit more thinning medium.

 

Number 3: Be Gentle!

Every time we apply one layer of paint over another layer we have to be very careful not to mix the two layers.

When doing mountains, be sure to hold the knife just as thight as Bob would hold a new born baby bird: Tight enough not to drop it, but not tight enough to hurt it. And baby birds (just like palette knifes) are very delicate creatues, so very little strength is needed for this. Just let the knife (or bird) do the work.

When putting highlights on trees or bushes drag your brush through the paint a few times to create a sort of rounded end on your brush. Then turn the brush in such a way that this rounded end points up and very gently put the paint on the canvas, almost not touching it. Applying the highlights in this way (along with thinning your paint) makes sure that you won’t pick up the darker layer that’s already on the canvas.

 

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Number 4: Using The Right Paint

First of all it is important to use oil paints. The Bob-Ross-Wet-On-Wet-Technique was developed for oil paints and if you’re using acrylics you’ll have a hard time getting the desired results. We’re not saying that it is impossible to do Bob-Ross style paintings with acrylics but it’s going to be much harded to follow along with Bob.

While there are times where thinner paints are needed (like when applying highlights, see above) most of the time you’ll get better results with dryer and firmer paints, so paints with less oil. You’ll obviously get the best results with the original Bob Ross paints. These are a bunch of oil paints that have been developed to work specifically with Bob’s technique. They even vary in the ratio of oil to pigments depending on the things you’ll paint the most with them. So darker colors that are used more often for background layers are firmer than lighter colors, which are used mostly for highlights.

If the original Bob Ross paints are too expensive for you (although they are definitely worth the money) there is a way to upgrade other paints by removing some of the oil from them. You can read more about this in the article about painting mountains you can find here.

 

Number 5: Stop Overmixing!

One thing most beginners do when first starting to mix colors on their palette is overmixing their colors. When mixing two or more colors it’s often the case that we don’t want to create a new color that’s completely uniform, but rather a marbled mix of colors that we can use for our painting. If you look at a tree you’ll notice that the leaves aren’t all the exactly same color. The same is true for the snow we put on the mountains. Sometimes the little bit of Titanium White that didn’t quite mix with the Prussian Blue will create a wonderful effect of light that gets caught in the snow on some mighty mountain in Alaska.

While Bob Ross makes it seem very easy to get the perfect mix it actually takes a while to get a feeling for when to stop. But once you have it you’ll create wonderful paintings with it.

 

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Number 6: Have Fun!

The most important tip of them all: don’t forget that you are painting for fun. Enjoy the process of creating something. Don’t get discouraged when something doesn’t work on the first try but rather try to find the beauty in learning a new technique and overcoming the hurdles you face.

Follow Bob’s advice and take mistakes not as mistakes, but rather as happy little accidents!
Too much green in your water? It’s a beautiful little pond full of algae now!
The snow got mixed up with the ground layer of your mountain? Seems like the mountain is even more rocky than you thought!

This is your world, you’re the creator. Feel free on your canvas!

One of the things most beginners find hard to do when first painting along with Bob Ross are mountains. They struggle with getting the paint to ‘break’ like Bob does, and while the old master creates the illusion of terrain with a swift movement of the hand and a small roll of paint on his knife, they are stuck with the same role on the painting and with almost no breakage and no terrain, just like pictured below:

One solution to this problem is to just slapping a lot more paint on the canvas and calling it a day, just like I did in my first painting:

But here is the thing: Since a lot people start painting with rather cheap oil paints the problem is not their technique but the paint itself! 

Oil paint in its basic form consists of particles of pigment suspended in a drying oil and the Titanium White that Bob Ross uses is a rather firm and dry paint, meaning that it does not contain as much oil as other paints. The original Bob Ross Titanium White is made for the wet-on-wet-technique while other oil paints, especially cheaper ones, contain way more oil than the Bob Ross variant. But there is a way to upgrade even the cheapest oil paints you can find to get better results!

 

To show you this trick I went out and got the cheapest paints I could find. A 12x12ml (or 12×0.4oz) set of them cost me around 4$, so one tube is a little more than 30 cents.

And just as one would expect the paints are not the best quality and just as firm as the baby owl that Bob had on his show one time.

As mentioned above oil paints are made from pigment and oil, so to get our paint to become firmer we need to find a way to decrease the amount of liquid oil in our paint. While there are stories about the old masters of oil painting leaving their paints out to dry over weeks and waiting for the day the paint had the perfect ratio of oil to pigments we don’t have time for this. So here comes the trick:

All you have to do is take some carton (I like to use the back of notepads as they seem rather absorbent) and spread your paint on it.

After around thirty minutes you should start seeing spots and stains of oil on the backside. This is the carton sucking the oil out of your paint.

Now it’s time so see if your paint is firm enough. Just scrape it off with your palette knife, put it on the palette and check the firmness. If it still very runny you can just put it back on the carton and wait for another fifteen minutes. Be sure to not leave it there too long. After around one hour the paint simply becomes too dry and won’t leave your knife when applying it on the canvas. If this is the case simply add a little bit of fresh white and mix it thoroughly. This is what happened to me, and since I didn’t have any white left I just scraped the paint from the first mountain I did and mixed it, which is why the snow on the second one has a little darker color. So I put down some rough mountain outlines and applied some paint. Below you can see the results using Titanium White fresh out of the tube and using paint that was dryed with this trick.

Continue reading “Paint Better Mountains – Upgrade Your Titanium White”

… besides Bob Ross.

While Bob is the indisputable king of painting instruction videos you can find a
number of great artists and instructors on YouTube. Check out some of our favorite ones:

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Kevin Hill

Kevin Hill is a 21 year old painter from California. He started painting by watching painting shows on PBS (most
likely ‘The Joy of Painting’ with Bob Ross) when he was 15 years old, and has since become a master of the
wet-on-wet-technique. Kevin is not only a great painter, but also a wonderful instructor whose soft voice and
friendly demeanor very much remind us of Bob Ross himself.

Today Kevin has his on painting show on PBS
called ‘Paint with Kevin’. In each 30-minute episode, he provides instruction in a calm, reassuring manner and
coaches viewers as they expand their painting skills.

Shorter versions of the episodes of his show and
livestreams can be found on his
YouTube channel or his website.

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David Dunlop

David Dunlop is a painter, a teacher, a lecturer, and the writer and artist on the Emmy Award-winning PBS series ‘Landscapes Through Time with David Dunlop’ and other DVDs about painting. He lives and paints in Connecticut and writes about his thoughts of art on his Art Blog.

While there are only a handful of videos available on YouTube we really love his Ten-Minute-Oil-Sketch
video. Another great one is his video about painting water lilies in the
style of Monet, in which he talks a little bit about the french painter and impressionism in general.(If you are interested in learing more about Monet and his paintings of water lilies, there is a fantastic book called ‘Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies’. You can even get it for free as an eBook if you join the Amazon Kindle Unlimited 30-Day Free Trial or as an audio book if you do the same thing for
Audible. Both trials can be canceled any time.)

Check out David’s YouTube channel and be sure to visit his website.

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Igor Sacharov

The Russian painter Igor Sacharov has a lot of videos on YouTube. While some of his videos feature english commentary most of them are in Russian. However, the self proclaimed ‘Russian Bob Ross’ does such fantastic paintings that it really doesn’t matter that you most likely won’t understand a word. If you have a little bit of experience you can still try to paint along and copy his techniques.

We especially love Igor’s seascape paintings and hope that you will enjoy them too.

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Which painters are your favorites on YouTube? Send us a mail at paintings@twoinchbrush
.com or contact us on Twitter.

Long story short: Original Bob Ross paintings are so expensive, you could use the money and buy yourself something like this instead..

Everyone that painted along with Bob Ross knows the wonderful feeling of creating something out of thin air, hanging it on the wall, and have people marvel at your talent. While nothing can match the almost therapeutic buzz you get from painting your own masterpieces a lot of us have thought about buying an original Bob Ross painting.

A painting by Bob himself is just something else. Painting along with him is easy, but how hard can it be to buy one? There are over 400 episodes of ‘The Joy of Painting’ and Bob did three copies of every painting on the show. So there should be over 1200 paintings from the TV show alone out there, and some of them just have to be on eBay or some other website.

So you open up your favorite search engine, try your luck with something like “Buy Bob Ross Painting” and are greeted with pages upon pages of Bob Ross replica paintings. Lots of people that probably started painting in their living room, following Bob’s instructions with some cheap paint, not expecting that one day they will earn a pretty penny with their new hobby.

eBay doesn’t look much better either:

Beautiful paintings, but they all are just done in “Bob Ross Style”, none of them are done by Bob himself. So for the average person the question “Can I buy a Bob Ross painting?” has a definite answer: No.

It is rumored that in his lifetime Bob made over 30.000 paintings. What happened to them all? Why is it so hard to find an original Bob Ross painting on sale? Here is what Bob said about some of them:

“One of the questions that I hear over and over and over is, ‘What do we do with all these paintings we do on television?’ Most of these paintings are donated to PBS stations across the country. They auction them off, and they make a happy buck with ‘em. So if you’d like to have one, get in touch with your PBS station, cause…we give them to stations all over the country to help them out with their fundraisers.”

What happened to the other thousands of paintings Bob did outside of the TV show isn’t known, but if you’re lucky and look hard enough you might come across an eBay listing like this:

So, an original Bob Ross for sale might cost you a few thousand dollars, but at least there is free shipping! This particular painting also includes a letter from the original owner who used to be stationed with Bob in the US Air Force Base in Alaska.

The best way for you and me to have a Bob-Ross-Style painting on your wall is to grab your brushes and paint it yourself. Get yourself one of the many Bob Ross Painting Kits ( the Master Set is especially great!) , take a few hours out of your day, relax with Bob’s calming voice and create your own little paradise on canvas. Nobody who ever tried painting with Bob regrets it.

And who knows, maybe one day your own paintings will sell for several hundred dollars on eBay or hang in galleries on their own.

We have written a guide to get you started with the wonderful joy of painting, which you can find here.

If you think you have an original Bob Ross painting or are about to buy one, you can send a mail to info@bobross.com and ask them to verifiy if it was really done by Bob Ross himself.

If you have ever watched ‘The Joy of Painting’ with Bob Ross you know that Bob didn’t only know his way around the canvas but was also a man of great wisdom with a wonderful sense of humor. It is no surprise that there is even a quiz on the internet with the name “Who Said It: Bob Ross or Buddha?”. Try it out and see if you can get everything right.

So without further ado here are some of our absolute favorite things that Bob said on his show:

About Happiness and Sadness:

 

On Talent:

‘Talent is a pursued interest. Anything that you’re willing to practice, you can do.’

 

About Politics and Trees:

‘That’s a crooked tree. We’ll send him to Washington.’

 

About the Director of the TV Show

‘I can’t go over 30 minutes, because we have a mean ol’ director with no sense of humor.’

 

On Uncle Sam:

‘Oh, if you have never been to Alaska, go there while it is still wild. My favorite uncle asked me if I wanted to go there, Uncle Sam. He said if you don’t go, you’re going to jail. That is how Uncle Sam asks you.’

 

Advice from his Father:

‘I remember when my Dad told me as a kid, ‘If you want to catch a rabbit, stand behind a tree and make a noise like a carrot. Then when the rabbit comes by you grab him.’ Works pretty good until you try to figure out what kind of noise a carrot makes…’

 

And Words about his Mother:

‘Tender as a mothers love… And with my mother, that was certainly true.’

 

About Friends and other special People:

‘Don’t forget to tell these special people in your life just how special they are to you.’

 

About Nature and our Responsibility:

‘If we’re going to have animals around we all have to be concerned about them and take care of them.’

 

And our all time Favorite:

‘We don’t make mistakes, we just have happy accidents.’

 

…

 

So, what are your favorite quotes by Bob Ross? Be sure to tell us on Twitter or send a mail to paintings@twoinchbrush.com.

Happy Painting, and God Bless, my friend.

1. Military Career In The Air Force

Ross enlisted in the United States Air Force at 18 years old and served as a medical records technician.He eventually rose to the rank of master sergeant and served as the first sergeant of the U.S. Air Force Clinic at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska, where he first saw the snow and mountains that later became recurring themes in his artwork. He developed his quick-painting technique to create art for sale during brief daily work breaks.

Having held military positions that required him to be, in his own words, “tough” and “mean”, “the guy who makes you scrub the latrine, the guy who makes you make your bed, the guy who screams at you for being late to work”, Ross decided that if he ever left the military, he would never scream again.

Source

2. Straight Hair And His Afro

While Bob Ross was very well known for his friendly and calm persona his most striking feature had to be his hair. But fact is, Bob had naturally straight hair and only got it permed to save money. Rumour has it that he even hated his ‘fro but had to keep it because it had become his trademark.

“He got this bright idea that he could save money on haircuts,” his longtime business partner Annette Kowalski told NPR. “So he let his hair grow, he got a perm, and decided he would never need a haircut again.”

3. Third time’s a charm

While Bob made it seem that the paintings he did during the tapings of ‘The Joy of Painting’ were done very spontaneous and full of ‘happy little accidents’ this was in fact not the case. In reality Bob painted the same picture three times:

The first copy always hid off screen, and Bob referred to it while the cameras rolled. He painted a third copy when filming finished. This time, an assistant would stand behind him and snap photos of each brushstroke. These pictures went into Bob’ “How to” books.

Source

4. Bob the Celebrity

After the success of ‘The Joy of Painting’ Bob had a number of appearances on nationally televised talk shows and was also regularly being spoofed on MTV and HBO. This trend continues until today.

While there is a story that Bob was once invited to the Oprah Winfrey show that we couldn’t verify, Bob was invited onstage  at the Grand Ole Opry in 1987 by country star Hank Snow. Bob being an old country fan accepted the invitation and gave Hank a private lesson afterwards.

5. He Did It For Free

Bob Ross never recieved a penny for his television show ‘The Joy of Painting’. However, Bob was a smart businessman and used the show as an advertisement for his own line of painting supplies. And boy, did he make a happy buck with it!

His company Bob Ross Inc. went on to become a $15 million empire of how-to books, videos and, most of all, Bob Ross art supplies.

Source

Bob often invited friends to paint with him on his TV show ‘The Joy of Painting’. These guests feature people like Dana Jester, John Thamm, Ben Stahl, Audrey Golden, Joyce Ortner, Dorothy Dent, Diane Andre and more.

 

Dana Jester is an old friend of Bob, who continues painting and making videos about it to this day. Check out this video of him painting some big ol’ mountains:

 

Another interesting guest is Bob’s old instructor John Thamm, who shows us how to paint a portrait in season 16 episode 6. While John’s style of painting might be very different from Bob’s style they sure can tell us a lot of stories from back in the day.

 

 

One of the most frequent guests and our absolute favorite is his son Steve Ross. And not we love him, it seems like Tumblr has grown a very special relationship to the young man:

 

You can find a list of all appearances of guest painters under this link.

UrbanDictionary.com defines a coke nail as “one significantly longer fingernail on one or both hand(s), most often the pinkie nail, which is used for scooping up powder cocaine and snorting it. This is known as doing a bump. The nail becomes the vessel as opposed to needing an item to snort a line of coke through; ie, a straw, rolled up dollar bill, etc.”.
And if you look closely and watch carefully you might just notice the same thing on the hands of Bob Ross. An example can be see on the picture of Bob and a baby raccoon below.

But why? Did Bob Ross do cocaine?

While the average person most likely does not even know about the existence of these nails and their use the coke nail got a bit of exposure in 2012 when several online news outlets claimed to have found a picture of actress Carrie Fisher, best known for her portrayal of Princess Leia in the original Star Wars trilogy, featuring an alleged nail for sniffing cocaine.

After reading about this theory on the internet Carrie Fisher herself however denied the “coke nail” on Twitter with this tongue-in-cheek comment:

I never used my fingernail for drugs. I used dollars or tiny spoons like any other respectable former drug addict. http://t.co/7jeu592i

— Carrie Fisher (@carrieffisher) 10. Oktober 2012

This still leaves us with our question. Why did Bob Ross have fingernails that strongly resemble coke nails?

The answer is found in Bob’s profession and passion: Painting.

Bob Ross was in fact not doing cocaine. A lot of painters use their nails to scrape off excess paint from their paintings. Using your nails is faster and more handy (excuse the pun) than using a tool for this, and for a serious painter like Bob Ross there is no question that he used this old trick too. See how close the nail is to the painting below? Using it instead of going of and grabbing another tools is certainly a lot faster in case you make a mistake.

Happy Painting, and God bless my Friend.