The Best of the Joy of Painting with Bob Ross

[Music] Hi, welcome back.

Certainly glad you could join us today because today I thought we'd do just a fantastic little winter scene that's very simple and I think you'll enjoy it so let's start out and have them run all the colors across the screen that you need to paint along with me.

While they're doing that let me show you what I've got done up here.

Have our standard, old pre-stretched canvas up here and I use an 18 by 24 inch but you use whatever size is convenient for you.

And we've covered the entire canvas with a thin, even coat of liquid white and liquid clear.

I have mixed them together so there's a little bit of each.

And I want a little transparence up here.

I want to have a little glow in the sky, I think, and for that, I put a little bit of the liquid clear with the white.

So let's do that.

Let's start out today with, we'll use the old two inch brush and a very small amount of the yellow ochre.

Just a little.

Okay, let's go up in here.

Now we have to make our first major decision right here.

We're, we're going to have a little glow in the sky.

Where's it going to live?

And maybe in our world, it'll live right about there.

And that's basically all we have to do, is just sort of draw a little oblong circle like so.

Wherever you want it.

We'll just let it sort of blend outward.

But there's not much color on the canvas, very little color.

And we're going to come back and we're going to add white in there to make it even brighter.

But right now we're just applying a little color.

I'm going to take a very small amount of dark sienna, very small amount, and go right back into that yellow ochre.

So it's a little bit darker but not much, just a little.

Be right back, there, dark sienna and yellow ochre.

We'll go up in here and right around that first little layer of color, we'll, we'll add that.

Something like so.

Same thing again.

And we'll come over here.

Just however.

Get a little bit more of the color on the brush here.

Same color.

Dark sienna, yellow ochre mixed together.

But notice we're starting out here and working back.

So the lightest area is in here because in the meantime it's mixed with the liquid white and it has become lighter and lighter in value.

So that happens automatically for you.

This is the lazy man's way of [chuckles] painting.

There.

Now then.

Now then.

Let's take, we'll take...

I'm going to take a little of the phthalo blue, same old dirty brush, phthalo blue, alizarin crimson and we'll begin making a lavender color.

And even a little bit of that dark sienna still in it.

There, okay let's go up in here now.

And we'll just begin putting this on here and it'll make sort of, sort of a coal grayish color.

There.

Okay.

We'll just fill the canvas up with it, what the heck.

We don't care.

Anything we don't like, we'll turn it into a happy little tree or something.

Because as you know, [chuckles] we don't make mistakes.

We just have happy accidents.

And very quickly, when you're painting this, you learn, you learn to work with anything that happens.

Anything that happens.

Same color we used on the other side.

We'll just lay in a little color around.

Something like so.

Okay, wash the old brush.

And we wash our brushes with odorless paint-thinner.

Shake off the excess, [chuckles] and just cover everybody around.

That's the fun part.

Now we'll just blend this out.

If you're cleaning brushes like this at home, I might recommend that you get a little brush-beater rack to put in the bottom of the waste paper basket or something.

It will certainly go a long way, as far as preserving your happy home.

Because if you do this procedure in your living room your spouse is probably going to ask you to find some place else to dwell.

There.

So a little brush-beater rack is only a couple of bucks and you drop it in the trash can.

It'll save your home, and your marriage, and certainly worth the investment.

There.

Okay, now we can smooth it out.

As we mentioned earlier, we want a nice bright spot right here in the center of this.

So I'm going to take titanium white.

Just a little titanium white.

Come right up in here with that pure white and just begin working outward.

Start in the lightest area and work always outward.

Always outward.

And this will make like a glow in the sky.

Very bright and it'll show up even more when we get darker colors around it.

Looks nice already.

There, now very lightly, three hairs and some air.

Just gently blend the entire sky.

It's all we're looking for.

And sometimes it's fun to put a little sun in there.

You can take a little white on your finger and just make a little circle like so.

And it usually looks a little better if it's round.

Those square suns seem to bother a lot of people.

I don't understand that but they do.

[chuckles] There we go.

That'll give us indication of just a little sun up here in the sky.

Tell you what.

Let's have, let's have some real fun here.

I'm going to take some blue, alizarin crimson, proportionately much more crimson than blue, because the blue is many, many times stronger.

And a little bit of that same dark sienna in there.

Same basic color we was using in the sky.

Just mixing up a little larger batch of it here.

Now then, maybe in our world there's some nice trees that live back here in the background and they just sort of... Let's just do it and see what happens.

Let's just see what happens.

That's the beauty of, of painting this way because we use no patterns and no tracings.

We learn very quickly to just let things happen.

That's when you experience the joy of of freedom and creativity.

You're not just tracing something that we've done and following along and filling in the blocks here.

You actually learn creativity.

There.

And that's where it's fun.

That's when it's fun.

Think about a big old tree that lives right here and maybe just sort of looks out over all of this.

And think about these things in your mind.

You paint mental pictures and you put them on canvas.

Quite frequently I'm asked how much I practice before I do one of these shows on TV.

Normally, I don't do a lot of practice.

I think about the painting in advance, mentally, and I paint a basic scene that I'm thinking about over and over in my mind.

And then when you come here to do it, it's easy.

It's like athletes practice if they're going to do a big jump or something, they'll practice that mentally over and over and over.

And it's the same here.

Just think about what you want to paint.

Just let your mind go.

There.

Anything that you believe you can do, you can do.

If you believe strong enough and you're willing to practice, you can do it.

There, just layer after layer here.

All kinds of little things that live back in here.

Wherever you want them.

Okay, let's have something on the other side.

Shoot, we don't want it left out.

This side will get jealous if we don't put something here.

I'll tell you what, yeah maybe there's a happy little tree that lives right there.

Right there.

But just using the corner of the brush, and that easy, you can build trees.

There.

Okay.

And by making this color a little darker, it'll look like it's closer to you.

See, already it's beginning to look layered.

And intentionally, we've left these light areas here because we want the sun to shine through.

When you're doing yours don't, don't kill all these.

This will excite people when you're doing it.

And, of course, I know nobody's interested in selling paintings, but if you're out there selling paintings, these little extras, that's what'll, that's what'll bring that happy buck home.

Okay.

Now then, let's take a liner brush, some paint thinner, and we want to thin this down until it's as thin as ink or water.

In fact, you can see it running right there on the palate.

See there, it's very thin.

Turn the brush as you pull it back off the palette.

Turn it so it comes to a very sharp point.

Let's go up here.

And, make some big decisions.

There's got to be tree trunks and sticks, and limbs, and all those things in here.

Take the brush and just begin putting them in.

Just all kinds of things.

Wherever you think they should live.

And maybe you don't see the entire tree, maybe there's something in the front here.

There.

Okay.

Some little doers that live out in here.

Wherever, maybe you can see a few little things there and here and here and there.

Just sort of let your imagination go.

Let your imagination go.

There.

Okay, maybe over in here.

Another thing that I get a lot of letters, people are continually writing and asking if we edit these shows.

There is absolutely no editing done to these shows.

No editing, what you see is exactly the way it took place.

We don't... And I know that there are other shows that do but this is exactly the way it happened.

If I did anything different without telling you, I'd feel like I was cheating you.

There.

All right, even the mistakes we leave on here.

[chuckles] Okay, let's go on the other side here.

This old tree here needs a nice trunk in it, something to hold it up.

We'll give it a wiggle here and there, so it's not just a straight trunk.

It's got some character to it.

We don't want one of them that just looks like a telephone pole somebody stuck up there with leaves on it.

There.

If you have trouble with your paint flowing, it only means that you don't have it thin enough.

Because if you painted with me before, you know our golden rule is, "A thin paint will stick to a thick paint."

But you can't reverse that and in this technique it doesn't work well.

Okay, let's put some nice little highlights out here.

I'm going to take a little bit of titanium white.

A little bit of the cad yellow, not much, just a small amount.

A little touch of alizarin crimson.

Maybe even a little yellow ochre and dark sienna.

See?

But there's a multitude of colors here.

It's not one flat, dead old color.

I want a lot of things happening in this little pile of color.

Push the brush, give it a little push.

That loads color right out on the tip of the bristles.

Okay.

Now then, we can go up in here and just using that little corner, you can begin putting all kinds of little shapes.

Now you can do this with a one inch brush.

Let me get a little more color going here.

You can do it with a one inch brush or two inch brush, it doesn't matter.

Just whatever's convenient.

I like the two inch brush because it seems to, to work a little better for me personally.

I want to put a little, little Indian yellow in there too.

Oh, that's what I'm looking for.

That's nice.

There we are.

Begin thinking about shape and form in here.

don't just hit at random.

Don't hit at random.

There.

Tell you what, you know, in the last series I showed a couple little baby squirrels, they were so small and they looked like little [chuckles] drowned rats.

And we've got so many calls about them.

I'm going to show you what they look like today.

[chuckles] These little devils are about grown and they're almost ready to be released.

And this is one of my little friends here.

He's setting on my settee, eating a little cherry tomato.

And they are the most gorgeous little creatures and I have so much fun with them.

I hope you enjoy seeing those as much as, as much as I enjoy showing them to you.

But they really are precious.

There.

I have one little squirrel that the veterinarian has told me that it probably has epilepsy.

So it has to live in the house with me and we give it medication, the whole nine yards, just like it was a little puppy or something.

And it sort of has free run of the house.

But he just runs around and plays.

Actually, it's a she.

There.

Maybe in one of the other shows in this series, I'll, I'll bring some footage in and show you what she looks like too because she's a cute little devil.

There we are.

And I'm just laying in some indications here and there.

Nice highlights on these trees.

There.

Think where light would strike here.

Put the little bright ones in there and let that light zing through.

Just let your imagination go.

Use just the corner of the brush though.

There.

Maybe even down in here we can see a little bit.

Just a little.

Now then, let me get a little more color here and let's go to this one on the other side and give him a little highlight or two.

Just a little highlight or two.

There.

Okay, a little bit right in there.

But see, you want to leave some dark areas in your tree so it's deep, otherwise there won't be any depth in the tree if you cover up all those nice dark areas.

Save them, they're your good friend.

They really will make your painting special.

Okay.

Down in here maybe there's a little something going on there.

A little bit more of that Indian yellow.

And we can come right there, there we are.

See that little bush?

He lives there, you knew that.

You knew that.

Okay.

Another one.

Just as many or as few little bushes as you want.

If you don't have a lot of paint, you can actually see the trunk right through there.

And to me that's sort of neat, I like that.

That's sorta special.

There we go.

See, and here's another one.

But work in the layers, doing the one that you think is farthest away and always working forward, forward, forward.

Leaving them dark areas in between.

Once again, that's what makes your painting special.

I want to get the least little touch of alizarin crimson.

I want one...

I want one that has a little more pink, a little more pink.

Right there.

Little warm spot right down where the sun's shining through there.

But in yours, you decide where you think all these little rascals should live and drop them in.

And if you notice, some of them here I have done nothing to, I've left them dark.

And that looks like ones that are back there in shadow.

[chuckles] Sneaky.

Let's take [chuckles], pure titanium white and maybe our snow starts right here.

Take the brush, touch, and just let it go.

Let it go wherever you want it to go.

See there?

Okay.

And if it picks up some of this color, that's a plus.

Don't get upset about it, enjoy it.

Enjoy it, let it happen.

Let it happen.

That's what makes it beautiful because it looks like shadows in there.

But, applying snow with a two inch brush is one of the easiest things in this whole technique.

One of the easiest and it works so well.

We'll put a little bush that hangs right out here on the snow and see what happens, it makes it look like there's a plane behind there.

It creates that illusion of depth and distance in your painting again.

So then we'll grab a little touch of that on the bottom, pull it across, and now you can see a little tiny highlight right there.

Just enough to separate.

That's what we're looking for.

There.

Okay.

Now, let's get crazy.

[chuckles] If you've painted with me before, you know I always like to do these wild, crazy things sometimes in the paintings.

We'll take some blue, some crimson, same color, just going to mix more of it.

We'll have some dark sienna.

I'm going to put some Van Dyke brown in there too.

Shoot, this'll darken it down a little bit.

Ooh, that's nice.

That's nice.

Okay, let me, let me grab another brush.

Maybe we'll do some, oh I don't know, let's have some fun.

Let's do some trees with...

I'll start with a fan brush.

Load a lot of color.

And let's make some trunks with a fan brush because it'll make nice, sharp edges.

And maybe some of these trunks will show through in this one.

There.

We'll have a little tree there.

Maybe... Maybe there's a big tree that lives there.

All you're doing is just tapping.

And I like to sort of tap downward so it makes these little fuzzy things on the side.

To me, Evergreens usually have little fuzzies on the side.

They're not real straight.

They got a little rough bark on them.

Okay, we'll have another one going off.

What the heck, it's your world, you do whatever you want.

There we are, now then.

Let's take, I'm going to grab an oval brush, I like those.

Now the oval brush makes nice trees that, that the limbs sort of hang down like they're tired and sometimes under the weight of snow or, or just old age, a tree gets tired [chuckles] and sort of hangs a little bit like me.

This oval brush does that very well.

Load a lot of color and let's go right up in here.

And we start by just taking just the side, touching, and begin thinking about shape and form here.

There we go, shape and form.

See, automatically though, this brush makes those nice hangy-downs.

There.

Just old hangy-down limbs.

There they are.

There they are.

As I say, these are fun to make.

In this series I think I'm going to use this oval brush several times, show you some different things you can do with it.

I like it.

It's easy to distinguish, it has black handle, where our other brushes have white handles.

And that's the reason we done that, so it's easy to tell.

Let's do this one here.

Here's one that lives way up here in the sky.

Way up here, it goes right on off the canvas.

What the heck.

What the heck.

We'll just let it live wherever it wants to.

There.

Got to give this old tree some arms.

Reach out here and grab some sunlight.

There we go, there's one right out there.

There.

And if you have trouble going over the snow, and we're not having any trouble today, but sometimes you do if you have a lot of snow back there.

And if you have trouble making that paint stick, add a little bit of paint thinner to your, to your brush and then go through the paint.

It'll thin the paint and allow it to stick right over that solid white.

For example, if you wanted it to and were having troubles but don't do that unless you absolutely have to.

We want to keep this paint as thick as we possibly, possibly can, so we can put thinner colors over the top of it.

I'm going to leave a little bit of the trunk showing right there.

Maybe it's sort of naked there, doesn't have any leaves on it.

Bad year.

Maybe, maybe when this tree was a, maybe a big old bear came by and stepped on it.

Hurt him, yeah.

But he did okay, he's all right now.

If you make up little stories like that your paintings are much happier.

As you've heard us say over and over in this show, if painting does nothing else it should make you happy.

It should teach you to see nature through different eyes and make you appreciate some of God's creations.

And I think painting does that for everybody who tries it.

I'm going to take a little white, a little, little tiny amount of the dark sienna, and I'm just going to touch, sort of give a little pull here.

Maybe this old tree here, maybe it's dead.

So we'll just see a little white zinging through there.

Just here and there though, don't want a lot of trunk showing.

Just enough.

There.

Okay, now then, I have several oval brushes going, so let's take another one and we'll dip it into the liquid clear because I want to thin the color that's going on there.

And we'll take...

Grab a little titanium white, a little bit of yellow, cad yellow, yellow ochre, and some of that red color.

Same colors we've used before.

A little Indian yellow too, ooh, that's good.

Let's get a little roll of paint right on the edge of that brush there.

Push it and create that little roll.

And let's come in here and let's make some trees that the light's just zinging through and it's having a good time out here.

There they go.

There they go.

But that's just with the liquid clear in it.

And the clear, all it does is thin the color a little.

Don't get carried away and kill all the dark though.

As we said before, that dark is so important.

It's your good friend.

Now back in here I'm going to add a little, least little touch of the phthalo blue to it, just to cool it down.

[chuckles] There, just enough to cool it down a little.

And it sort of gives it a greenish hue without really painting green cause we, don't we don't want green snow.

It's the only thing worse than yellow snow.

Don't want to make any snow-cream out of that.

Of course I have a good friend here that told me, he never noticed the difference.

There.

But he said he never could get any of his friends to eat any of his snow-cream.

Okay.

A little more of the color.

We'll put a few little highlights on this tree.

We don't want it left out but just, just drop them in.

This little oval brush it almost happens automatically and once you try it you'll understand what I'm saying.

It's sort of hard to explain but because of the shape it almost happens automatically.

Darker, darker, darker down here toward the base.

All right.

Let's take our brush that has the titanium white on it.

I want to grab the bottom of this and pull it.

I want to intentionally pick up a little of this dark color because that's going to end up being my shadows in here.

That's going to be my shadows.

There.

Okay.

Now then, maybe fan brush, we'll use the old fan brush.

And we'll just go in here and pop in a few little bushes and stuff that live right around the bottom of all of these.

Just a few little things.

With a clean fan brush, it has to be clean, you can grab that and pull it.

It's also a super way to make little sand-dunes in seascapes, same, same identical way.

You can create all kinds of little things.

Okay, let's see.

Let's go back here, take a little bit of our darker color.

Not too dark though.

Just come right along in here.

Just pop in a few little indication of a bush or two that lives down here.

Then we go back to our lighter color, a little yellow, white, a little crimson, yellow ochre, Indian yellow, all the little colors that we've been using.

Same thing.

Just pop in some highlights on all these little bushes.

But that easy, with the corner of the two inch brush you can just do fantastic little things.

Change the flavor a little bit here and there.

So it don't all look just the same.

Okay, back to our brush with the titanium white.

We can grab this and pull it again.

And each time you do this it creates another plane or another level in your painting.

And it really makes it special.

Tell you what [chuckles].

You know me.

I like them big trees, so let's do one.

Let's go into Van Dyke brown and dark sienna.

Just mix them on the brush.

Yeah, I think we oughta do it right there.

Just drop one in, just brown.

Maybe we'll give him an arm, make it a big old tree.

And it sets out here and it just watches this beautiful little scene all by itself.

Take a little of the paint thinner on the liner brush and come back in here and put the indication of some little limbs and sticks and twigs, and all those things that live on there.

Just like so.

Shoot, I think with that we about have a finished painting.

I think I'll put one more little limb there.

We'll call this one done.

I hope you've enjoyed this painting.

It's very easy and bring a lot of good things to your heart.

From all of us here, happy painting, and God bless my friend.