The most fascinating thing about watching Bob Ross paint is how he creates all kinds of things without any effort at all. He paints trees and bushes by lightly smushing his brush into the canvas. Their reflections are a little bit of paint dragged straight down.
The secret of Bob’s technique for painting mountains is to let your painting supplies do all the work for you. All you have to do is drag a small roll of paint across the canvas.
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.
An Easy Way To Dry Up Your Oil Paint
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.
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 dried with this trick.
While the breakage is not as good as Bob’s you can clearly see the effect of ‘upgrading’ the paint by drying it. So while you will get the best results using the original Bob Ross products this technique might push your paintings to the next level.