I thought we should start easy, with Season One, since we don’t know how to paint, but Aidan saw a colorful one in Season FIFTEEN, and said "LET’S DO THAT!"
I was like, "Ummm-kay."
So, we haul out all the painting supplies and go through our paints looking for the paints listed on the video:
Titanium White: we were getting very low on that one, will need to reorder lots.
Sap Green: that one wasn’t even open yet--yay!
Most of the colors had some fancy names like some eccentric artist just pulled the weirdest conglomeration of words out of the ether. Names like phthalo green, alizarin crimson, and cadmium yellow.
I can’t even pronounce the first two, and although we had pthalo green, we didn’t have pthalo blue, azithrol crimson, deep sienna, and a few others. We also didn’t have the primer Bob Ross used, or the big a$$ paintbrush, or the tough palette knife, or even decent palettes.
That didn’t stop us, though. We are pretty good at improvising! Although the next time we attempt this, we will definitely get the right materials.
So, we were finally ready to start the video, and Bob started by quickly spreading a transparent yellow across the canvas. We quickly realized our brushes didn’t produce the same effect as Bob’s, so there was nothing transparent about our yellow. Instead, it was blobby and heavy.
Then, before we could even get that right, he started with the az-whatever crimson, and spread that transparently around the yellow.
We then realized, with a little dismay, that without the right tools, this was gonna be a lot harder than Bob made it look.
I tossed a couple seriously messed up canvasses aside as I tried to accomplish the simplest thing on the whole video. Lol.
But as we progressed, we enjoyed Bob’s soothing tone, and his great little sayings like "It’s a great day to be alive," and "You are the author of your world in this painting, do whatever makes you happy."
So, we did. I saw that my yellow and crimson sky just wasn’t gonna work, so I decided my scene
would be a nighttime scene, somewhere way up north where the Northern Lights came out to play.
And I realized the water area of my painting also looked nothing like water, so I changed that to a field of red and yellow flowers.
At one point, my daughter and I were working as fast as we could to keep up, and when we looked up, we were both like, "What?!"
Because Bob’s skeleton of a painting had magically turned into something...magical.
Actually, nothing in my painting looked like Bob’s, but at least people could recognize that my mountains were mountains, and my pine trees were, at least, trees of some kind.
In the end, painting with Bob made us happy, and we were both excited to try again, with the right tools next time.
I think the investment for a couple big a$$ brushes and a couple palette knives and a few other things will be one of the best investments I’ve made this year. :)
That guy was kewl!