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

[Music] Hi, I'm Nicholas Hankins.

Welcome back to the painting studio for another Bob Ross adventure in our wet on wet technique.

Up here, I have an 18 by 24 inch pre-stretched, double-primed canvas, painted it with black gesso.

That's a water based paint.

I allowed that to dry completely.

After that was dry, I applied a very, very thin even coating of liquid clear and some transparent colors.

I've got some Indian yellow in here, alizarin crimson.

You might be able to see it a little bit.

Prussian blue and alizarin crimson.

And a little Prussian blue and black all around the edges.

So with all that in place, let's get started.

I'm going to take a little one inch brush today.

We're going to do a little, a little wintertime painting.

But I want to, I want to put some warm color in it.

I want to have like a nice warm wintertime sunset so I'm going to use a little titanium white and cadmium yellow, just sort of mix them together on my 1 inch brush.

Let's come up here and we're going to hit that yellow and really set that sky on fire.

Whew.

There we go.

And as I just continue to work upward and upward we'll hit that crimson and then it all comes alive.

Isn't that neat?

These are the types of paintings Bob used to talk about.

They're fun to demonstrate for your friends and family.

You just, you don't tell them that you put any color on here.

You just pick up a little white, take off, and all this magic starts to happen and they go, "Oh, that's amazing.

How did you do that?"

But that's our little secret.

You don't tell them, of course.

We'll wash that brush out.

Now, I'm just going to wash it in some odorless thinner, shake it out.

We'll beat the devil out of it.

Let's see.

Tell you what.

Before we, before we carry on, I'm going to come back with just a little more white, on a clean, dry, one inch brush.

I'm going to extend that up just a little farther.

I think I want to, I think I want to have a little more color up at the top.

So I'm going to come back and kind of catch this in progress and we'll extend it on upward and outward like that so we get a little more of that blue purple feeling just, just like it's at dusk.

Sun's just about to go to sleep for the day.

Now, I'll grab a little two inch brush and then come back and crisscross strokes I'll just soften this together, take some of those harsh brush strokes out and really, really smooth it down.

Make it look like a nice wintertime sunset sky.

There we go.

Something about like that.

And in the same instance here, let's go back and we'll grab another clean....

I've got to use a bunch of brushes here today because there's a lot of, a lot of changing around here.

I'm going to go back into some of that white and yellow mixture, and I've got reflections that are going to be in some water down here.

And they're going to catch, see that they're going to catch some of those colors, too.

So I need to pull some of that color down and into my water because it would reflect down here, too.

Like that.

There we go.

Even a little, even a little from down here, maybe.

Just so we get a flavor of that happening.

Go back to my, go back to my two inch brush and give it a few softening strokes just straight down like this.

And then we'll brush across, bring all that together.

Kind of pretty already, isn't it?

Got a piece for the Museum of Modern Art if we stop right there.

[chuckles] Okay, now let's take our, let's take our knife.

I'll just move some of that light yellow over.

We might want some of it later.

I don't know.

We might want some later.

I'm going to take some white, some Prussian blue, alizarin crimson, mix those together.

Maybe more crimson.

Yeah.

There we go.

Got to have a little bit more crimson than blue.

Make a nice, make a nice lavender color for some foothills way off in the distance back there.

Go back and take a little one inch brush.

Just load it up.

Load it up full of that color.

Give it a little push.

All right, let's come back here and we're going to cut a nice little silhouette.

I'm just going to take the corner of the brush, tap it into the canvas and kind of let it, let it slide down like that.

Just let it, let it wander across the the bright sunshine there.

The last embers of the day.

And we'll take a clean one inch brush, and I'm just going to tap it and fuzz it out, make it misty at the base.

Just tap it firmly like that.

Far off, little distant hills.

Let's come back, pick up a little more of that same color.

If I have a nice misty area there, I can take the same color and add another layer foothills without even changing anything.

There we go.

And same again, just going to soften that out and hit it, hit it firmly.

Just with a clean brush, just tap it firmly.

Soften it up, you know, right where it passes in front of that, right where it passes in front of that sun sometimes it catches a little ember of... let's take a little bright red, I'll add to our color here a little bright red, maybe a little, little bit of dark sienna.

Sometimes you can kind of make out the little touches of almost like some of those dead trees, their leaves have browned and it just lights them up.

Just a little touch of that though.

I don't want to get too, too wild and crazy back there.

A little taste of that's enough.

All right.

Clean up my mess a little bit here.

I'm making a mess already.

That's a sure sign you're having a good time if you're making a mess.

I'm picking up a little half size round brush and I'm going to tap it into some Van Dyke brown and dark sienna.

I'm just kind of jumping back and forth Van Dyke brown, dark sienna.

I'm going to come up here at the base of these little foothills now and make some closer trees that we can see a little more texture on.

A little more texture, just tapping with the top corner of the brush like that.

Tap it.

That's all you've got to do to paint little, little trees with this brush.

That's one reason I love it so much.

It works so well for that.

Just let those wander all the way across there.

I'm going to wash that brush because I want to use it again later, but I don't want that brown color in it so shake that out.

Clean that one up and dry it off and we'll have that ready to go for, for some closer, for some closer little bushes and trees.

Closer, closer yet, closer still.

Maybe these are a little frosted.

Let's take, let's take a little liquid white, pardon my reach there.

Take a little liquid white and I'm going to grab a little touch of Prussian blue and just tap right in there with it.

Makes it nice, bright, pretty sort of frosted ice, crystal blue.

Let's come back here and just touch very gently plenty of paint on the brush, but touch it very gently.

and just create all kinds of little, little frosty bushes and trees right there.

Might even see, if I take the little liner brush and some odorless thinner, a little Van Dyke Brown, I might even see just a couple little indications of some trunks and sticks and twigs and etc.

sticking up back there.

Just a few little things.

I don't want to get too involved because they're supposed to be way, way, way back in the background and I don't want too much detail back there, at least not yet.

Not yet.

We'll get there eventually.

Clean up my palette.

I always run out of room on my palette.

I try not to, but it happens.

[chuckles] Let's take some titanium white now on a, on a fan brush.

I've got a big fan brush.

Load it up nice and full let's come back here at the base of these little trees.

Even, even giving these just a little, a little softening, a little bit of softening with a clean brush.

And then I'm going to kind of cut them off with a little, little snow field here.

[Nic makes "shooo" sound] Just stretches right across there.

And then I'm going to soften it into some of that under color that I applied.

And it's going to give us a, going to give us just a beautiful little effect there.

We've got some, got some shadows amongst all of that snow.

Every so often we'll clean the brush out and grab a little fresh paint and then you can kind of add some highlight to your ground, pull it a little closer.

That'd be a good opportunity to, I've got a little, little mop brush now that I just love, and I'm going to soften that with that little mop brush.

Take a little, little touch of the titanium white, a little touch of liquid white and I'll mix those two together.

Make it nice and soft and cut across and get just a tiny, tiny little roll of paint.

And we'll come up here and cut a little water ripple.

Or maybe that's some ice forming and gathering around the edge of the, on the edge of the creek of the stream here.

Just kind of rub that right in there, like that.

All right, all right.

It's time to get serious now.

Are you ready?

We're going to peel some of this color off of our palette.

Get a little room to work, and we're going to do it to it.

We're going to take a big bunch of blue and black, Van Dyke Brown and alizarin crimson.

Just make a big old batch of dark color and then we'll play with it, see what we come up with.

There we go.

That should be sufficient, I think.

Wipe off my knife here.

Okay, we'll take, we'll take a fan brush and I'm going to grab a little bit, a little bit of that lavender and some of my new color here and just kind of get an in-between flavor first.

Load up both sides of my brush.

And let's go back here and start to create just some distant little evergreens that live back here on this side of the water.

[Nic makes "tchooka, tchooka, tchooka" sounds] Just let them wander down here about like so.

Come back with that, come back with that little one inch brush and just tap a little mist in here.

Soften, soften, soften.

Take my two inch brush and really soften it out.

And now we're going to take that same fan brush and just go for the dark color alone.

Only the dark color this time.

We're going to have closer bigger trees, like right there.

Closer, bigger trees.

Maybe these, maybe these little branches kind of point upward today.

So often I paint little, little evergreens where the limbs hang down, but the upturned branches are really pretty, too.

Not sure what species of evergreen this is indicative of, but they're happy.

I know that they're happy.

Put another one right there.

They're happy.

He'd need a little friend to share the joy.

So there we go.

Maybe there's another little one right there.

That one's kind of scrawny.

It's younger.

It's still, it's still growing up.

I might even see, I might even see a little reflection of these down in the water so I'm going to go ahead and just poke around a little bit there and grab my two inch brush and sweep it.

Brush across, that way we've got a little indication of that, that reflection of that tree down in the water.

That way it feels like it's really, really real.

It's really anchored in there.

Another one right there.

Here he is.

Maybe, maybe one more in this little pocket right there.

I just feel like that needs one too.

Just pressing up with the brush pushing, pushing that handle upward.

There we go.

Take my little knife and kind of finagle a tree trunk in these, just sort of sharpen up that top edge, go back to my little fan brush that has the, the white on it.

I'm going to, going to add some blue, a little liquid white to this, dip into the liquid white and soften it just a touch.

Ooh, liquid white went flying there.

Get into my work.

What can I say?

[chuckles] Let's come back up here and give it, give it a little, little frost on these two or light snow maybe.

Don't want those to get too, too light though.

I don't want to lose the contrast in them.

There we go.

A little on that one.

{Nic makes "tchooka, tchooka, tchooka" sounds] A little on that one.

Not too much.

They're kind of getting into the shadows back here so they're going to be a little more quiet.

A little bit quieter, little trees back there.

All right.

Down at the base, down at the base of these trees, we've got to cover up the bottom edge.

So let's just, let's just grab all this stuff.

I've got titanium white.

I've got liquid white in there.

I'll add a little bit of that blue.

And I'm going to, going to load that brush just by tapping again.

We'll make some more little frosted bushes.

Plenty of texture on that brush so let's come up here to the base of these little trees and just give it a little tap, tap, tap, tap.

Plenty of paint, plenty of paint and a light touch.

[Nic makes "tchoom tchoo, tchoo" sounds] And just try to preserve some of that dark in there.

Don't cover it all up.

That way it will, it will appear to be layered.

That's always really neat.

There we go.

All right.

I'm grabbing a, another big fan brush here.

I've got to dirty another one.

Add just a little drop of liquid white to my, to my paint.

Make it flow a little better and then just load this brush absolutely full.

Absolutely full of paint.

We'll come back and kind of do a little bit of the same thing here.

I'm going to seat the bottom of those bushes down into the, into the ground, give them a little mist there and then we'll just kind of cut them off wherever we want to with snow, [Nic makes "shoop" sound] like that.

[Nic makes "wwhhhit" sound] And don't be afraid.

You will, you will pick up a little bit of that darker color, but that's a good thing.

See, this is working away from the light and it needs to get a little darker.

You need to have some shadows in there.

Take our little one inch brush and just grab the edge of it.

Pull a little bit of that down, brush across.

Got my little mop brush handy.

I can kind of soften my snow just to the degree that I want.

And once again, I'll take a little, little titanium white, liquid white, make a little, make a little ripple right there.

There's some ice kind of forming up on the edge of the, edge of the pond.

There we go.

Just kind of [Nic makes "whht" sound] hang over like that.

Let's see.

All right, now that we've got some dark, we can come back and contrast with some brighter snow.

Have a new, have a new plane or a new layer in here like that.

And then once again, I'm going to let it work down sort of to the edge of the stream or edge of the creek.

Come on down here.

Just sort of wiggle around.

Come on down.

And there's another little embankment.

Fill that with some dark.

If you get into a big enough area like this, then we can take a bigger brush.

We can grab that one inch brush and kind of smooth it down.

Make it pretty.

Grab a little bit of that once more, let it reflect into the water.

There we go.

Wash out my brush and start fresh here.

It's picked up a lot of that blue, which will happen.

When it gets to the point that it just doesn't want to refresh it again, it's time to, time to wash it out and start over.

Nothing wrong with that.

No matter, if you're painting a wet on wet painting, no matter what you do, it's going to mix a little bit.

It's going to mix a little bit.

All right.

Let's have, let's have a little, little extras in here.

Let's have some little contours that we see just kind of bouncing around.

Same with this one.

Add little extra bits of highlight, little changes in the lay of the land.

And then we'll soften them either with the one inch brush or a little mop.

Just depends on, depends on the effect we want.

A little ripple, a little ice around the edges.

Once again, that's so pretty.

I love that effect.

It's just so neat.

Reflections work spooky good with this, with this method.

It is something else.

Let's come over here on this side.

Got a neat little, neat little scene going here.

So let's have, let's have a little bank come down.

We just about slid right into the creek on that one.

Brush across.

Get my other little brush and just soften it a bit, smooth it down like snow.

Let's have another layer in front.

Tell you what, now that I'm thinking about it, we can cut our little, little ice ripple in there right now.

That'll make it easier.

We can just plant the new one in front.

Hot dog.

[chuckles] Sometimes I have a good idea.

They're not real often so I try to, I try to grab them when I can.

I try to grab them when they [chuckles] when they turn up.

Getting to be a rarity anymore.

A little embankment maybe that reaches out right there.

Yeah.

See, just by, just by controlling the value how light or dark something is can either make it come forward or recede in your painting.

And as long as you keep little things like that in mind, it's, it's just unbelievable what you can do.

Pull a little reflection down from that area as well.

Clean that little edge up again.

Have a little, little ripple in that section.

And in that section.

You can have all kinds of fun with this stuff.

Let's take, speaking of which, speaking of fun, let's have a little more.

Let's take some white, a little liquid white.

Just, I want to make a, I want to make a light color here, at nice, nice white-ish color that's a little softer than paint right out at the tube so I'm just adding liquid white to this paint on my palette to soften it up.

I want it to feel soft, like, I don't know, like face cream or Cool Whip or something like that.

I don't know, I don't know exactly how to explain that, but softer than it is right out of the tube.

Then I'm going to load up a little filbert brush with some Van Dyke brown, a little touch black, nice and full on both sides.

Then I'll pull one side [Nic makes "whht" sound] through that light so I've got dark on one side, light on the other side.

We'll turn the light side up.

Let's come up here and just plant some little rocks at the edge of the, at the edge of the creek.

So you have big rocks or little rocks.

It's just, it's kind of up to you.

Pull the dark side through the dark, light side through the light.

Like I say, you can paint as many little rocks as you want to and they can be any size you want them to.

Just a nice way to sort of clean up the edge of that, edge of that little stream.

What else do we want?

Let's have maybe a couple of little ones back here, a few little ones there.

Maybe there's a bigger one right there.

But that way you get your dark and your light all in one stroke.

That's kind of cool.

That's a neat little trick, huh?

Let's take our, let's take our little fan brush here.

It's got the dark or excuse me, has the light color in it from my snow banks.

And I'm going to, I'm going to charge it full of the browns so we have kind of a in between brown, maybe even a little bit of that lavender.

That sort of sounds like a gross color, doesn't it?

Brown and brown and white and lavender.

Watch what we do with it.

It kind of depends on context, what you do with it.

So if I crunch up a little, just like dead grass and weeds that are kind of, these are the taller ones that are poking up through the, through the snow a little bit there.

Like that.

Take a little liner brush, some of that Van Dyke Brown, give them a little [Nic makes "pshoo" sound] a few little weeds that stick up.

Sort of settle them down into the, into the ground.

We can even have, we could even have, let's take our filbert brush again fill it full of Van Dyke Brown.

Let's have a little, let's have a little tree over here that's, is hibernating.

Just kind of lives right on the edge of that bank right there.

[Nic makes "wwwhhhit" sound] Take a little white, a little sienna, just give him a little, a little touch of highlight on the side of his trunk there.

[Nic makes "wwhhhoo" sound] Right on down.

Grab a little white paint, just kind of settle his foots into the ground.

Then we'll take a little paint thinner and some of that brown and we'll give him a few old arms that are just kind of just kind of still hanging on, clinging to here.

They'll be back in the spring and he'll be back in the spring.

He'll be pretty, full of leaves.

He put on a heck of a show in autumn, but got to take a little nap now.

There we go.

Shoot, we'll leave well enough alone.

I like that painting.

Hope you do too.

Thanks for joining me.

And 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]