Bob Ross, Eat Your Heart Out!

That probably wasn't a very nice thing to say since Bob isn't around anymore. I learned a lot from watching him many years ago. I always loved that there were no mistakes in his world, just "Happy accidents". Thanks Mr. Ross. I miss you. It always amazed me that he could finish any kind of a painting in 1/2 hour.

I cheated and used some of his fast painting techniques on the backdrop for the tintype studio.

I tried to see around the guys in the photo, but I had to make a lot of it up as I went along.

This was the first step. I had a piece of mat board that I cut to what I thought was about the right size. The first step was sketching what I could see of the backdrop. Then I used tube acrylics to do the painting. I started with the sky. That was the furthest away from the viewer.

I am not going to go through all of the steps in pictures. Next I did the mountains, then the trees and buildings. Then the last was the columns and floor.

After I laid in all of the colors, I went back and did clouds, the details on the mountains etc, until I reached the front once more. Most of the scene will be covered by stuff in front of it. I didn't put in too much detail.

I did go back in with Prismacolor pencils to add a touch more detail here and there.

Here you see the panel in the corner where it will eventually end up. I put three chairs in it just to see if the scale looked about right. It does. I think that it could still use more detail. I only worked on it for a couple of hours, so it is not a finished painting as paintings go. I could spend days and days on it to get it right. I'm not going to. It's another one of those things that I don't think that people are going to inspect in detail.

Anyway, that's what I got done this morning. Oh, and I stained all of the counters and shelves. This afternoon I am going to add trims to those to make them look older. They are way too plain for my taste. Back to work.

See you tomorrow.