Family Fun - Bob Ross Paint-along

 

With lockdown still in full swing I dug out an activity I'd had planned for ages but we hadn't done yet. A Bob Ross paint-along. I'd bought some canvasses, paints, palette knives and brushes almost a year earlier at The Works. It'd all cost roughly £12.

I googled which would be the easiest episode of The Joy of Painting to follow along with and the internet suggested Distant Mountains from the 14th season. If you're not familiar with Bob Ross, he was a lovely guy that had success with his painting show in America. He was known for his soothing voice as he painted and his positive outlook on life. 

We watched the episode via YouTube on our TV and brought the dining table into the living room to make things easier. Val decided not to paint along but to do his own thing. Erin, JD and I got ready to follow along with Bob Ross feeling cautiously optimistic.

After the first 5 minutes we'd built up the sky and some water in the foreground. We were all new to painting with oil paints and we didn't have the exact colours Bob did or even the same brushes but we did our best to improvise as we went.

My favourite part was using a palette knife to create the mountain shapes. I'd never tried this technique and I thought it worked really well. I was pleased with how my mountains turned out. 

It became apparent halfway through that we didn't have enough white paint for doing as much highlighting as Bob did, due to an initial white-washing of the canvass at the start. But we were to far in to turn back so we kept going!

Our pictures all turned out differently from Bob's but we were all fine with that and our three pictures looked very similar due to sharing the same colours.

My masterpiece.

Erin's masterpiece.

JD's masterpiece

It was an overall nice experience but Bob Ross is so great at painting it can be a bit disheartening when he does something you can't quite replicate. Also, oil paints are messy and everything smelled of white spirit for the rest of the day after cleaning the brushes. But it was fun to have a go and I'm glad we did it. We now have a set of oil paintings to sell on eBay treasure forever :)