The Best of the Joy of Painting with Bob Ross

Hi, welcome back, I'm glad you could join me. Today, I have a special treat for you. You know, we've had a young artist on this show in the past and we've got literally hundreds of letters just raining praise on his fantastic abilities and I'm very prejudice because I'm talking about my son Steve and I'm very proud of this young man. I've asked him to come back today and show you what he can do in just a couple of minutes. Now, Steve travels all over the country and he teaches literally thousands of people the joy of painting. So, I'll tell you what, let's turn it over to Steve and I'll see you later. Steve. Thanks, Dad. Okay, we're gonna do a simple painting today and use a lot of pastel colors unlike other things we've done before. We're gonna start off with just a little bit of Indian Yellow on the two inch brush. Then you want to tap that paint in real evenly on the brush. Okay, and then we're gonna go up to the canvas. Just some little X strokes and I'm trying to make it look like the sunlight is just sort of blending out into the sky. And maybe we'll just put in beginning water reflection down here at the same time. Now, I'm gonna go into a little bit of Alizarin Crimson. Use less of this color because it's very powerful. And again, always remember to tap that paint into your brush well. And just a little bit of that up here. We're gonna be putting blue above this later. So, if you have this Alizarin Crimson in here it keeps the blue and yellow from touching and we all know what you get when you mix blue and yellow together. Okay. If you sort of dab your brush out a little bit then go over to a little bit of Phthalo Blue you can get that part in, try to remember now that you are just blocking in a shape and later, you're gonna come back and blend it all out. The colors that we're using today will be right across the bottom of the screen, so... If you need to get hairs out that's a good way to take them out just use the edge of the brush. Okay, now, we'll do a little bit of blending with a clean dry brush. You want to make sure that the definite lines between two colors disappear when you're doing this. And of course, you always want to keep in mind that if you go up into your blue and come down into your yellow that's a green sky. Okay, so, I just slowly move up here. Trying not to go back in my yellow. Then we can clean that brush out one more time. And blend again, whenever you're in doubt about what to do clean the brush and start new because a dirty brush will really hurt you on the sky. Now, if you want to reflect these same colors down to the water you can start off with just a bit of Alizarin on one side of the brush and a little bit of blue on the other. And you can come down here on your water and just lay in some straight horizontal strokes. Always remember that still water lies flat. Okay, then wash your brush out. Now, the same thing in the water you're trying to move the lightest color down into the darker colors. So, bring that yellow out. And eventually, you have to go all the way across it. Now you might pick up a little green in here but the water is green anyway all the time, so, you don't have to worry about that too much. Okay, I'm gonna use my number six fan and with some titanium white and maybe just a couple drops of liquid white. And we'll load the paint real evenly on the brush and maybe just a dot of Alizarin Crimson in that. Now, you have to remember when you re working on your clouds is that the light fluffy shapes on top and they are basically flat on the bottom. So, as long as you get a lot of little puffy things going in them up at the top, you're doing okay. Okay, so you get the basic shape in there. Then you can come back in with your big brush flatten out the bottom of it, pull it out real lightly and then go over the whole thing real lightly. Now, it's very simple to make it look like you have two clouds one underneath the other you can just put in that shape and save a small dark area right here. That's very important. It takes dark to show light. So, you always have to remember the light is just as important as the dark and the dark is just as important as the light. Without one you can't have the other. The same steps on that one. And maybe there's one over on the left hand side. Put a little bit more Alizarin Crimson with this one. As you can see I'm really not trying too hard to make any definite shapes. If you've ever studied clouds real carefully, they are no definite shapes there are all just kind of out there. Okay, now, I'm gonna use my one inch brush and go into a new color that'll be Alizarin Crimson, Phthalo Blue, just a touch, and Midnight Black. And I'm loading these colors on my brush to be sure I get a good variation of color and then you just come over to your white, mix a little white in with that. And you come up with a light lavender color. You might need a drop of paint thinner in this to get it to stick to the canvas. Okay, now, we're gonna go up here with the one inch brush and just start tapping. Try to make your shapes very full. Instead of just leaving one line like this. We need to fill it in. I try to imagine what a hill looks like when I'm painting this part of the picture 'cause it seems like if you envision something in your mind first it always comes out better. Okay. Now, just lifting the top. These are like distant pine trees. Okay and then almost the same thing you did on the clouds. Except for this time, you just use a little bit of Alizarin Crimson and sort of just smash and twist out the bottom of this. The Alizarin Crimson gives you some pinkish glow at the bottom of your hill. If you're ever interested in selling paintings pink is just one of those colors that really catches someone's eye. I do a lot of paintings with pink in them. And so, I smash out the bottom and then I can load my one inch brush up some more and make one hill come in front of the other. As you watch the painting getting closer and closer to being finished, you'll notice that about everything I do is the same steps they are all very simple. You are either using dark to separate two entities or light. Here, we're using mist, light. Okay, so, I smash out the bottom of that one. And it looks like you have one hill in front of the other. Now, you might want to get some more of your black and Alizarin on your brush. And darken up that color about one value. Okay, and then we'll mix that and come in from over here. I'm trying to make this one look a little different. So much of the problems with a lot of the first paintings I did was everything was just too organized or symmetrical. So, you want to try to think very freely and get your hand to move over the canvas, you know like a true artist, you know, you gotta have that true artist thing. Okay, lift these up. And you want to make sure you lift through the whole foot hill, too because the scratches that the brush leaves in the paint helps indicate little trees too. Get a little bit more of that Alizarin Crimson on your brush as you are tapping. Keep that pink in there. Okay, now I can go in to do some more of that Alizarin and black together, but this time I'm gonna put a little Sap Green with it, and leave it dark. This will be our base color for the rest of the painting so all our dark shapes will be done with this. These are trees and bushes in the background. You don't have to get too over detailed on this because it is far away. It is going to be highlighted later so that will change things a lot. Right now, you're just trying to get that dark color in there. Now, I'm using my knife to scrape in a few little sticks, twigs. It's one of those things that makes that makes the buyer of your painting or the viewer think that you spent hours and hours on it. You can nest out the bottom of that a little too. Okay, now, I'm gonna dip my one inch brush down in the paint thinner. Shake off the excess and about what you have got left on the brush is good. So, you're working with a paint that's about Cool Whip consistency. See. Now, I'm loading the brush very full and I'm gonna touch very lightly up here. See, if you go into a little bit of Phthalo Blue you get a nice light green color. The shapes are very important here. You're trying to make your bushes look round on top and the bottoms of them you don't need to worry about 'cause that will all be covered up with land. See, you can also make grass by using the side of the brush to just push in. As long as you leave a dark space there. Maybe a little bit of bright red with that. It makes sort of an Okra color. Now if you get to a point on your brush where it's so muddy colored that it won't show up You can dip down into your jar of liquid white and use some of that to thin your paint and come up with a much brighter color. So, you really don't have to wash your brush through here. Okay, now if you come in with your pallet knife a little bit of Van Dyke Brown. What you want to remember here is to smash your paint out very flat and then put your knife straight down onto the pallet and pull towards yourself. And you end up with a small hitch of paint or a role. And then you re just going up to the canvas and touching and pulling to the left, a real hard angle to the left and don't worry about grabbing some of that green that just casts a reflection onto your land. This is one of those things that looks a lot better after you pull the reflection out of it and put grass on top of it. See, we'll do that now. Two inch brush and just pull down a little bit of that brown. And if you put a little bit of another color on there you can pull down some of that too. Okay, and you just want to go across that with a clean brush. Now, you can reflect some of these bushes into the water. It doesn't have to be a really distinct reflections. Like I said before this is so far away. And go over those real lightly. And the same way you did your grass before you can tap in a little bit of grass on top of the land. Just trying to diffuse that line on top where the land and the bushes connect. Okay. Now, with a little bit of liquid white on your pallet knife. Spread it around on your pallet. And get just a little bit on your knife. Come up here and just like you're trying to scratch a hole in the canvas. Just a little water line. Something to separate the land from the water there. Okay. Now over here on this side I think we'll have a birch tree. The way you do that is you gotta roll your pallet knife and you're gonna come up here just connect lines together by touching. Okay, the same thing over here. Try to put a little bend in your tree. Give it some character. You can turn the knife upside down and fill in the other side. And you want to make sure your trees are wider at the bottom, of course. You can always straighten them up with the liner brush later so you really don't have to worry about their shape too much though. Okay. Now we can go over that with a little bit of Titanium white. Just spread that out on your pallet and get a nice little roll on there. Very lightly go over that tree. Kind of pull in that C shape sort of a round... That gives the tree a round effect instead of flat. Okay. Now down along the bottom here I'm just gonna smash in a bunch of foliage. That's that same mother color. For all the bushes and background things. We use the same color. It's kind of a dark green. Okay, and if you pick up your liner brush and go through a little bit of Van Dyke Brown, you want to thin this down quite well about Indian Ink consistency. Spin the brush to the paint. Okay, now you can extend your tops. Make some little branches. You don't want to waste a lot of time on these branches because it seems like the faster you do them the better they come out. You're releasing your pressure as you are coming out from the trunk. The reason I say you can throw these branches in quickly is 'cause you're gonna cover them up with the next step which will be the foliage on the tree. There's a neat thing about branches though if you have some you don't like all you have to do is just keep making more and more and pretty soon they look better. Okay, just like we did the bushes at the bottom smashing in some little rounded shapes when you get in this white on the cloud right here it's gonna be a little rough, you might want to thin your paint just a touch. It's hard to get any color to stick on top of white. Okay. Notice I'm saving some big open areas. I believe Dad calls those places for the birds to build nests. You don't wanna close up too many spaces here. Otherwise, you get sort of a huge apple tree like a big round ball. If you have ever attempted this before you know it's easy to get sort of a large shape going accidently. Okay, so a little bit of the dark and then we'll come back and highlight that with the same colors we used to highlight the land and the background. So, first a little bit of green for our bushes and then we'll do our tree. It's really not as much as how you do it it's the shape that you make. Then you can switch your colors back and forth whatever you want to use. Indian Yellow and liquid white make a nice color. As a matter of fact that's what we'll be using on our tree today. Indian Yellow with liquid white. So, a little bit of liquid white and Indian Yellow. Let's put a touch of Bright Red in there just for the heck of it. So you can go into your Indian Yellow and just touch your Bright Red a couple of times and you get some neat little orange leaf shapes. They are kind of orange with little red dots on the end. And... I think I'll throw a little bit of dirt down here in the bottom. Which is Van Dyke Brown the same way we made the land in the background. And a little grass on top of that. Well, I think this one is ready to sign. I'll just use my liner brush and some bright red. Okay, well I think that one is finished for today. I'd like to thank you Dad for letting me do the show today and happy painting. (music)