The Joy of Painting with Nicholas Hankins: Bob Ross' Unfinished Season

[Music] Hi, welcome back to the Painting studio.

I'm Nicholas Hankins and I'm looking forward to sharing with you today a little winter scene using the Bob Ross' wet on wet technique.

So come on up to the canvas, I'll tell you about what I've got going on here.

It's an 18 by 24 inch pre-stretched, double primed canvas and I have already applied a nice thin even coating of the liquid white.

So it's all wet and slick and ready to go, so let's take off and we'll have a little fun too.

Just with that same brush, that same two inch brush I'm going to go into a little bit of Prussian blue.

Reach right next door and pick up a little midnight black, Prussian blue and midnight black.

Got black and blue.

Let's head up to the sky here.

I want to paint a very cold looking scene today.

Keep it,keep it in the blues and grays and just see what we come up with.

I'm kind of planning for a few little clouds.

I know I want some puffy, billowy clouds in the sky.

Maybe this is after the snow storm.

Snow's already fallen and blanketed everything.

Made it pretty.

I just have to paint snow if I, if I want to enjoy it.

I live in Florida and we don't get a whole lot of snow.

But, I can paint and pretend like [chuckles].

There we go, something about like that.

While I have that color on the brush, I'm just going to, might even pick up just a little more a little more of that blue and midnight black.

Just paint a little shadow down here.

If we're going to have snow, we've got to have some shadows in here, too, so this will serve as our shadow color.

Something about like that.

All right.

Let's wash this old brush.

Follow me over here to the bucket.

And we wash the brushes in odorless paint thinner because they don't like soap and water.

That'll, that'll harm your brushes in the long run.

Shake out the excess and just beat the devil out of it.

[chuckles] That easy.

That easy.

Now, let's come back up here.

We'll start in these light areas.

Soften it out.

Get rid of any unwanted lines, any brush strokes.

Anything looks unnatural, we'll just get rid of it.

And I'm going to blend a little, little bit down here in what will eventually be my snow as well.

All right.

Now, let's play.

Let's play with some clouds and see what we come up with.

Oh, we'll find a, we'll find a little fan brush here.

I'm just going to load it with Titanium white.

Maybe just a little bitty touch of bright red, just to kind of warm it up and make it, make it stand out a little bit better.

I'm going to load both sides of that brush very, very full like that.

And let's come up here and paint some puffy, happy little clouds.

Billowy little clouds.

Just making little tiny circles.

I'm kind of, kind of looking at these, these little light pockets that I left in my sky, I kind of left open in there as a suggestion for where the clouds should go and maybe, maybe kind of what shape they should take.

You'll do that after you've been painting a while.

You'll, you'll kind of learn to take, take cues from your canvas.

It'll, It'll almost, it'll almost tell you what it wants.

That sounds a little funny, but you know, like they say, artists are expected to be a little, a little different so we talk to our canvases and we listen to them, too.

Just working out a nice little, nice little top, top shape.

That's all I'm worried about right now is this outside or silhouette shape of the cloud.

Down here I don't, I don't really care what's going on just yet.

Once in a while, you see me reaching over.

I'm just wiping the brush out.

Because I'm picking up a little blue and black as I go.

There we go.

Just do something about like that and we'll go back and grab our sort of, sort of clean, dry brush.

[chuckles] I'm going to blend these clouds.

I'm first going to take the top corner of a two inch brush and to spin it around.

Not really touching the tops, not yet.

Just kind of dissolve the base of those clouds and then I'll give it a little fluff and brush across.

There we go.

Do the same thing on this one.

Let's spin it around, spin it around until it sort of anchors it into the painting, anchors it into the sky.

Fluff it up and brush across.

Simple as that, simple as that.

And you can paint as many or as few clouds in your sky as you want.

That's entirely up to you.

I think I want just a little bit more.

Maybe, maybe back here.

We'll kind of let that one drift over and become part of that one.

Clouds just float around and do whatever they want to.

And there really is no right or wrong.

That's one of the reasons they're so fun to paint.

There aren't, there aren't too many rules.

[chuckles] There we go, that's a wild looking a little thing, but once you soften it into the sky, it kind of takes its proper place.

There we go.

Got a neat little hole you can look through in your sky there.

[chuckles] All right, that's enough messing with clouds.

Let's get on to a snowy old mountain.

So we'll take the knife, let me clean up some of this garbage here.

We'll take a little, I'll take a little blue.

I'm going to go ahead and mix a pretty big, pretty big batch of this, because I'm going to use it throughout the whole painting.

Some black, Van Dyke brown, alizarin crimson.

Mix that all together.

That's a super dark color.

All right.

Wipe off the knife, we'll cut off just a little roll of that paint.

Like that.

Just need a little, little bite of paint right there on the end of the knife.

Okay.

Let's come on up here and decide, maybe, yeah, yeah, yeah, right there.

We'll have a big old mountain that lives right back there, like that.

Scraping away all that excess paint.

And then we'll give it some other little, little bumpety peaks that live out here.

We'll have another one, let's say, make that, make that a little sharper right there.

There we go.

Let's have another little peak that maybe drops off that way.

There we go.

Something like that, something like that.

Good enough for, good enough for what we were doing.

And we'll grab that paint and pull it out.

Soften the bottom edge.

Just sneak right to that little edge and pull it down.

And of course, this paint blends and moves and does magical things because we have liquid white on the canvas.

That's what gives us the ability to do all of this so fast.

All this blending, all this softening, it's just so easy.

So easy.

Having that liquid white on there is almost like cheating.

But that's all right.

That's all right.

Okay.

Now.

This little man's got to have some highlights.

If the snow has fallen, it will certainly have fallen on the peaks of the mountain.

So let's come up here, grab a little white.

And again, I'm going to take just a tiny little touch of bright red and add to that.

Cut off a little roll of paint once more.

And let's come up here and add just some beautiful little highlights to this mountain.

No pressure on your knife.

None whatsoever.

[Nic makes "sssshoo" sound] You just let that knife float, just let it float.

[Nic makes "sshhoo" sound] See?

It always works better when you make the sound effects.

Always works better with sound effects.

And nine times out of ten when we have a class and somebody struggled a little bit with getting their paint to break apart like this and leave all these little textures, normally it's one of two things happening.

Either they're, they're using a paint that's too thin or they're putting too much pressure on their knife.

And you literally need no pressure at all.

No pressure at all.

Let's just have those two just, just connect up right there.

All right.

Now, let's take a little white, a little touch of the Prussian blue, maybe even a little bit of that phthalo blue.

Mix them together, even a little touch of the mountain mix, that dark base color that we made for our mountain.

Mix all that together.

Looking for, looking for something about like that right there.

Let's take this up here and add some shadow now.

Just little, little shadows that fall on the opposite side of the mountain.

[Nic makes "sshoo" sound] A little bit, a little bit in that pocket right there.

A little bit sneaks right in there, makes that little valley.

That's where you go skiing if you're a good skier.

I've only been a couple of times and I weren't real good at it.

I'd kind of like to try it again sometime though.

It was fun.

There we go.

Back to that big brush.

I'm just going to knock off some of that excess paint.

Give this a little tap, soften at the base of our mountain.

Make it misty and quiet.

There we go.

Sweep up, get some of those tap marks out of there.

Something about like that.

I think I want just a little, just a little more snowfall right here.

I kind of want that to, yeah, like that.

I just want that to sweep over a little bit.

[Nic makes "tchoo" sound] That's more like it.

That's what I was, that's what I was wanting right there.

Still kind of undecided, but I think that's what we want.

That's the bunny slope there.

That's the one I should probably be on.

[chuckles] Yeah, Yeah.

One day, one day I'll try that again.

Okay.

We'll just mix some of that mountain color with some white.

That was my leftover shadow snow.

Want a little more crimson in that I believe.

Yeah.

There we go.

A little more of a lavender type color.

Lavender gray.

We'll load up a fan brush just, just full of that color.

Let's come up here and way back in here now we've got some trees that live at the base of this mountain, and they live in those little misty pockets.

They live right at the base of the mountain.

And when you preserve those little misty areas in your painting, that's what makes it easier to paint these, these forward things, these things that are coming forward in the layers.

That's what makes this simpler.

That way you're not trying to paint over lots of heavy paint.

Be a little more difficult to paint over a thick mountain snow but I'm, I'm just packing it right into this little area here where we tapped it down and there's hardly any paint at all and it looks so good that way.

You can see all that mist floating in the valley.

Those little misty areas are your friend in many, many ways so pays to, pays to treat them like friends.

Here we go.

Just kind of let that run off wherever.

Over there.

We don't really care right now.

Don't really care right now, but we will later.

We can kind of come back and slice everything off where we want it.

These little trees, we don't know how tall they are exactly.

That's the beautiful part of this.

We'll just kind of dissolve the base of those little trees, maybe fluff it up, lift it up a little bit.

We'll just come back, kind of cut them off, park them right where we want them.

Let's have another little grouping of trees over here.

I'm going to go, I'm going to go a little darker now.

I'm going to pick up more of the mountain mix just on my brush.

This is a little spot adjustment, a little spot mixing.

[chuckles] Darken our color just a bit, got a little more crimson in there with it.

There we go.

Just so these feel like they're a touch closer because they're going to be bigger.

See, we're going to have going to have some bigger trees back here like this.

Just take the corner of that brush and push them out of there.

There we go.

Kind of vary the heights.

These are, these are the same type of trees that you have in the background back there.

They're just much closer so we see way more detail.

That's how you, that's how you create that illusion in a, in a painting, in a landscape, you have to control how light or dark something is.

And then you have to think about whether it's closer far away and if it's far away, you're not going to see as much detail so you have to kind of, you have to leave it a little mysterious back there.

Leave some mystery in it.

Just carrying on here.

A few more of these little trees.

I want to, I want a good little, good little cluster of trees standing back here.

They're huddled together to try to keep warm.

That's, that's what it is.

There we go.

Have maybe one more big old tree on the edge here like that.

Bring him right on down.

Now, once again, I'm going to grab that, that big brush and just kind of, just kind of dissolve the base of them a little bit, make them, make them blend together and form together.

You can kind of create this, this illusion of a little, little plants or something just by taking a little bit of that color.

We can even add a little to the brush if we want.

Just kind of make a little scrubby growth down there, something like that.

Come back with our knife and clean up the tops of these little trees just a bit.

Something like that.

I've got my little brush here I was painting clouds with.

Watch this.

Let's take a little liquid white,a little titanium white, a little phthalo blue and some mountain mixture.

There we go.

We'll put a little, put a little indication of some highlights on those trees.

Maybe that's snowfall that's dancing across in there.

Again, I don't want to see too much detail, though.

These are still kind of far away.

And living in the background back there.

Kind of quiet trying not to attract too much attention to themselves.

There we go.

Now, check this out.

This is what I was talking about, kind of placing everything right where we want it.

Let's come back and grab a, grab two inch brush.

Let me get rid of this blue here.

Move that over to the side in case we want to use some more later for something.

Let's fill this two inch brush just full of white, full of titanium white on both sides.

Load it up good.

You can get a little touch of your bright red if you want and warm it up.

That's fine.

Makes it kind of pretty.

Makes it pop.

So I get that brush absolutely full of paint.

Nice and full like that.

And then let's come up here and just decide [Nic makes "wwwhhhhoooot" sound] like that.

That's where our snow lives now.

See?

Just like that, you've got a snow field back there.

Then we'll fill it in and see how that's going to work with our shadow that we already put in there.

Pretty slick, huh?

[chuckles] There we go.

I think I'm going to pile it up kind of... it's got a little bit of a slope to it.

Kind of coming down this way.

I like that.

All right, now let's do something in the front here.

We can't just have an old field with nothing in it, so we'll grab, tell you what let's grab a filbert brush.

I like those filbert brushes.

We'll fill this one with some Van Dyke brown, a little dark sienna.

Load it up nice and full.

We'll come up here and paint a little, well, not little.

We'll have some big trees up here in the front.

Give him a friend too.

[Nic makes "rr, rr, rr" sounds] Oh, went through my mountain.

Dog gone it.

Oh well, you saw how to paint it.

You saw her paint it and we know it's back there, so no harm done.

Trees going to be up front, it's got to cover up something.

[chuckles] But because that, that's thick paint right there I'm going to have to ... you probably will have to go over that a time or two and that's all right.

Get it, get it like you want it.

Get it as dark as you want it.

Let's come back and grab a little more brown, a little dark sienna.

I'm going to have another little tree right there.

Maybe this one's a touch smaller.

He's still pretty big, though.

He's a medium big tree.

Here we go.

Just darken that in real nice.

Come back, take our, take our knife remove a little bit of my remnants here.

[chuckles] Clean off the palette and have a remnant sale.

Take a little titanium white, Van Dyke brown, dark sienna.

Just mix it together until it's kind of, kind of marbled like that.

Cut off a little roll of paint.

Let's come up here and just give these old trees some rough bark texture.

Kind of, yeah, kind of like that.

Just touching the knife, touching it and letting it take some, letting it take whatever, whatever it wants, basically.

Make these look real rough.

And when it dries, it feels like bark.

That's so cool.

Just, just make sure it's dry before you put it out where people can, can touch it and find out.

I have found over the years that any, any time I would put a wet painting up somewhere, I just, I couldn't stand it.

I had to put it out, let people see what was coming up for a class or something like that.

People always ask, "Is that wet" with their finger?

Just, it's always work that way.

So you've been warned.

Be careful.

There we go.

Just a little, little something, something on those trees.

Take a liner brush and pick up some, pick up some paint thinner here and Van Dyke Brown.

I'm just sort of scooting the brush around and rolling it in my fingers to load it full of that nice thin brown.

And let's come back and we'll find on these old trees they've got some gnarly old little, little limbs that just kind of hang out here.

Some of them are just little, little things.

Some of them come out and fork off and have a little, maybe wiggle around like that once in a while.

Just a few little, few little things.

I'm not going to be too worried about this because we'll cover some of them up with some foliage.

We've got to put some needles on our tree.

I just want a few little things hanging around in case they show.

Come over and get a few on this one too.

Sometimes they have a bunch of them.

Just little, almost look like a ladder you can climb up, There we go.

I grew up amongst a lot of trees, so I do love to paint them.

All right.

Come back, and I tell you what, let's grab a, let's grab a, a clean fan brush so I can dirty it up with nothing but very, very dark color.

I don't want any white in this.

We'll fill this one just super duper full of that dark mountain color, that base mixture, that makes a good, good color for winter evergreens.

And we'll put a little, put a little foliage on these.

Now, I don't want to go through and lose every one of my little branches.

I want some of them to show.

So I'm trying to be a little bit strategic here about where I, where I crunch some, some needles onto these boughs.

I like them when they sort of look a little bare and austere in a few spots.

Yeah, something like that.

Something like that, maybe a little bit right there.

This one needs a little too.

A little bit of, a little bit of stuff around their foots, too.

You've got to cover up their foots.

[chuckles] Otherwise it just doesn't look right, doesn't look right.

I'm going to grab a little bit of that and sweep it out here.

So it feels like there's some nice, strong shadow coming from that.

Kind of settles it down into the, into the snow a bit.

Swish out one of my brushes here.

I'm going to pick up some of that, some of that blue, a little white and blue, a little liquid white.

[Nic makes "whhht" sound] Be right back.

[chuckles] Be right back.

All right.

We'll put a little, little snow on these, too.

I'm going to let this be a little bit brighter because, like I say, it's up a little closer.

Again, don't want don't want much.

I don't want to lose that contrast in there.

It's too pretty.

It's too pretty.

Let's come down here, crunch a little, a little new fallen snow on those.

Save your darks in there, though.

Take a little, a little bit of that brown.

Maybe pop in a little stick or two here and there.

And we're going to call that painting finished.

And I hope you enjoyed painting it with me.

Until next time.

Happy painting.

Take care.

[Music] [announcer] To order Nicholas Hankins' 68 page book with 13 painting projects or his companion DVD set, Call 1-800-BOB ROSS or visit BobRoss.com [music] [music]