Bob Ross Day

Following my post on gimmicks:

We spend one morning in my watercolour workshop focusing on textures and how to achieve different ones using various methods of repelling and resisting pigments, stenciling, stamping, blotting up, spraying, using dry and wet brushes of different shapes, etc.

In the afternoon, I lead everyone through a fantasy painting. There are three approaches to painting: from direct observation, using reference, and pure imagination.  The latter is the most difficult to teach and do, to my mind, so I lead everyone through various initial steps to acheive a purely invented but three dimensional landscape, acheiving a sense of space and distance using the studies we made in the morning

The paintings inevitably end up rather kitsche and are my least favourite of the week, but nevertheless serve a useful purpose and I find myself constantly referring back to this exercise the following week when we are painting  in the field.

I refer to this day of superficial effects as my Bob Ross Day. Bob Ross was an extremely successful American artist, in financial terms, who demonstrated on television shows how to paint instant art to impress your family and friends...