I watched him (on TV) do exactly what I tried to do today…put in blue sky and then add clouds… you folks know what you are doing, and I know one or two of you began with the Ross techinque yourselves…what am I doing wrong?

I watched Bob Ross when I was younger, I never took him seriously, it was just a TV Show.

I will be blunt with you, so excuse me if this sounds rude:

You are trying to imitate a painter without the proper training, and long practice that takes to be one. You are trying to paint a sky just by putting paint on the canvas, but you need to know first how to paint a sky, it is necessary to practice doing it, maybe not once, but several times, using the correct technique. Yes, it is possible to learn all by yourself, but the road ahead is long and filled with rocks.

Oil painting is like driving a car, you can’t just jump to one and drive. The process can be divided like this:

First you learn theory, traffic signs, laws and regulations.
With this knowledge at hand, you are now ready to practice, and do hands-on training, the instructor will be there with you to step on the brakes when necessary.

After many hours doing the same again again, you are issued a license, but only if you can prove you have mastered how to drive the car.

Without being there, it is hard to say. Possible pitfalls with the wet-on-wet method usually are:

Your layer of liquid white is too thick. After you apply the liquid white, lightly touch it with a finger tip. The paint should appear only on the ridges of your your fingerprint. If you have too much paint on your canvas, take a clean, big brush and just brush back and forth, and cleaning the brush as needed as you remove paint from the canvas.

Your layer of sky is too thick. If you have too much paint on the canvas, any paint you add will just blend right in. The more you manipulate it, the more it will blend and disappear.

You do not have enough white paint for the clouds on your brush. Once you have thin initial layers of paint on the canvas, in order to add the next paint application, now the paint needs to be thicker and heavier.

I haven’t used liquid white (or Alexander’s Magic White) for a while, but also make sure that you have thoroughly mixed it before you start. If I remember correctly, the oil separates on top and needs to be mixed back in.

As Dcam and Stapeliad mention, Pthalo blue is a very powerful paint with very strong tinting characteristics. I would try Ultramarine or Cobalt blue (or whatever other blue you hopefully have) and see if this makes a difference.

Hope this helps,

Don

Yeah oils can get out of control real quick, it’s a nightmare sometimes. I might be wrong… but if you are painting white clouds on a blue background you don’t need liquid white under the blue background. The blue is your ‘liquid white’.

It looks like he puts down an insanely thin layer of paint as a background. When he grabs the paint onto the brush he pushes most of the paint into the bristles of the brush so just a touch goes onto the canvas. Which he then vigorously rubs into the canvas, like a tint of color.

Then, white clouds are painted with slightly thicker paint. I found that the key when painting clouds is knowing when to stop. Blend just barely enough to get a soft shape and then stop. Stop. Try very hard not to over blend or over correct. Paint the whole batch and then see if anything needs more blending, there’s a good chance everything fixes itself by the time your are done

Oooh I see, makes perfect sense to make a gradient like that. None of the youtube videos I looked at had that part, sorry OP

Controlling the volume of liquid white and then subsequent paint applications of paint, as well as altering the thickness of the paint during the process is part of what makes those easy results not so easy to achieve at all.

Try practicing more though, and enjoy the process of learning. I spent easily 40 or 50 hours of just working through those techniques when I was learning oils as a kid. They provided me the skills to control a brush and how to load it and all of that. Pay special attention to how old Bob loaded the brush for painting skies. Also note, he painted on large canvases for his show, but if working smaller use smaller brushes. A 2″ brush on an 8×10″ panel is easily two to three times larger than is needed for a small panel. I didn’t figure that one out for 20 hours of trials.

It is cheaper and more efficient to learn the techniques in parts, keep your mistakes to compare and learn. After they dry, if you want to reuse the panels or canvas, paint over them completely with white and allow it to dry, then put your couch (liquid white) on top and go again.

Side point. There are several posters here who spell Phthalo blue as Pthalo Blue in this thread. Ive noticed this regularly on this site. Is it spelled differently in America? Just for future reference. Cheers!

I spell it Pthalo only because I don’t know how to correctly spell Phthalo…:lol:

Grumbacher, it may be noted, spells it Thalo. Good for them!

Don

I don’t know how sold you are on learning the Bob Ross style, which is way harder to pull off than Ross made it look. If you just want to learn to paint in general, there are probably other better places to get beginners’ information. You might consider just painting geometric shapes for a while. First learning to paint just the shape of a ball, a cone or a rectangular block with light falling across their surfaces from different angles is a great way to start out. It’s always better when beginning to learn anything to bite off just small pieces of the larger body of knowledge and focus just on those smaller things. Not everyone learns the same way though, so maybe others could perhaps suggest other good beginner lessons. That is, once again, if you’re not determined to learn just the Ross method.

I also second what everyone has said about the pthalo colors – they’re incredibly strong and difficult for even experienced painters to handle. There are several paint companies who offer a “Manganese Blue Hue,” or similar paint that they make with a combination of Pthalo Blue and Titanium White. These are far less powerful and might be a good substitute to consider.