Taking advantage of sales at the local Michael's and the awesome Jerry's Artarama store in Newark Delaware, I bought enough basic supplies to attempt both some oil painting and some acrylic painting. With a limitless trove of YouTube advice and tutorials, including all 30+ seasons of Bob Ross' Joy of Painting series, off we go...
Painting #1 (oil on 9x12 canvas panel). My first ever attempt at a painting of any kind (mid-February 2020). It was done in one sitting, and was when I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I bought some oil paints and sat down to paint something. This was the result. I tried to do a Bob Ross style painting, but without any of the tools to be able to do the Bob Ross method, which is a very specific technique. It's beginner-friendly. If you have the right tools and supplies. Which I didn't (at the time). The best I can say of it is that parts of it aren't terrible, and more importantly I learned a lot about oil paints. Mostly about what you can't do, which frankly isn't a bad place to start.
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| #1 - Mountain landscape in oils (small) |
Painting #2 (acrylic on 8x10 stretched canvas). Having done a rudimentary oil painting, I tried an acrylic one next, intending it to be some sort of wizard's tower or sage's abode for our D&D campaign. It was an interesting contrast, coming only a day or two after the oil painting experiment. While oils dry in 4-5 days, causing their own set of specific behaviors on the canvas, acrylics dry in no time at all. You can blend oils for days on the canvas. You can blend acrylics for minutes, then things start to get tacky and the paint begins to "break" if you go back over it again while partly dry. Layering is obviously much easier, as a part of the painting can dry while you do another part, and then you can go back to it for the next part without muddying the paint underneath. Once again this was a learning experience in a new medium, and there are some things I like about the painting and a bunch that I don't.
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| #2 - Sage's abode in acrylic (small) |
Painting #3 (oil on 16x20 stretched canvas). My first attempt at a Bob Ross style wet-on-wet painting. It is similar to Season 1 episode 13, although not an exact copy. His technique is remarkably easy to get a passably good result for an absolute beginner, but there are definitely some things to get used to and some things that Bob mentions but perhaps doesn't stress to quite the degree that would have been more helpful to me. Overall, I am very pleased with the result. I like the sky, I like the mountain well enough, and I love the pond and the shoreline. The trees and bushes are OK in places but not so great in others. All in all, I like it.
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| #3 - Bob Ross copy in oils (medium) |
Painting #4 (oil on 14x18 stretched canvas). A few days after Bob Ross attempt 1, I did this one. I wasn't painting from an episode or a picture, I just sat and did whatever came to mind. It is mostly the Bob Ross wet on wet method with a few other things that I wanted to try. Overall, I am pleased with this one as well, although the distant line of hills is too washed out with nothing in the middle ground to tie it better to the foreground. This one pointed out the need for giving some thought to composition rather than just sitting down, picking up a brush and jumping in. In this method of painting, you paint from back to front, and once you have done the foreground, you can't really go back and fix things behind it that you would like to. So a valuable lesson learned in composition and planning.
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| #4 - Bob Ross style landscape in oils (medium) |
Painting #5 (oil on 8x10 stretched canvas). I had about an hour one evening and wanted to do something a little different, so I used a picture I found online to copy this little impressionistic landscape. It's simple and far from perfect, but I kinda love it.
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| #5 - Impressionist landscape in oils (small) |
Painting #6 (acrylic on 8x10 stretched canvas). Another couple days later I wanted to keep up with practice, and started this small acrylic landscape. I worked on this off an on in small 10-15 minute increments over the course of 4 or 5 days, working from a photo I had found online in a Google image search of something simple like "fertile fields". The photo didn't say where this actually is, but it reminded me of lots of places not too far from home, or someplace farther removed but that I have been to like the Shenandoah Valley. Another good learning experience. By this time I am learning that I need quantity of practice, not quality of end result. In other words, paint a lot to get better.
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| #6 - Landscape in acrylics (small) |
Painting #7 (oil on 18x24 stretched canvas). A fail. This was going to be another Bob Ross-ish mountain scene following along with another YouTuber who paints in similar style. The sky came first and was fine. A big mountain came next and completely went off the rails. I have waited until this dried, and have begun painting over much it so that I can re-use the canvas and start again. Or at least start the mountain again using the same outline. More lessons learned.
Painting #8 (oil on 18x24 stretched canvas). There is a wonderful YouTuber artist named Stuart Davies who does amazing tonalist/impressionist landscapes in a very particular style using a very particular technique. This is not an attempt to follow his technique, but to do a similar kind of painting using more traditional brushwork. Parts of this one I really like, and parts of it I am less thrilled with. But there is nothing about it that I hate.
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| #8 - Landscape in oils (medium) |
I have started another painting or two, and given the current situation, will probably be bored at home and in need of something to do for a while, so I hope to get in a good amount of practice. Having gone over my rudimentary efforts to date, I'll probably go over what I have learned so far and various other thoughts in another post soon.
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