Finally... A CANVAS Canvas!

This is a first attempt at a Bob Ross painting.

Audrey III            3/23/12              18" x 24"

It's also a first attempt working with oil paint. 

Or paint in general for that matter. Well, paint on CANVAS, that is.  Much of what I tend to work in - that people think are paintings - is with soft pastels...

...or soft pastels combined with colored pencils. 

PRISMA-COLOR to be exact. They're a bit pricey, 

but they really ARE all THAT.

Back to painting.

I've done a lot of set painting in my sordid past. 

Now, one of the aspects of theatre that I've come to love 
happens to also be the name of a text that was used at the university I attended - Process to Product - taking 
in the brainstorming of ideas, the 
research, the auditions, 
rehearsals, and 
of course...

opening 
night! 

But that's not before tech week! 
And then...it closes. You revel quietly... 
and then not so quietly at the cast party...

you do it again.

Process to Product. 

Rinse. Repeat if desired.

One of my favorite backstage painting techniques 
is the use of wet blends. It's this use of smearing a few 
colors together - quickly, while it's wet, to make something 
that looks like wooden paneling, or, say...
 a floor (wood OR marble)... 


or who KNOWS what.


Some of the best theatre sets I've seen were in fact styrofoam, PVC, and recycled pieces of 1/4 ply. Recycled to the 
point of looking like something from Larry Shue's 
The Nerd on one side, and Little Shop of 
Horrors or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 
on the other.


 It's this same use of wet blends that led me to blending and smearing the pastels when working on paper...

...and eventually the Sharpies, when working on people.

And that's PART of the secret to doing those Bob Ross paintings. 

It's a "wet on wet" technique, allowing for certain blends...smears...to happen in just the right places. Those 

"happy little discoveries" that Bob talks (talked) about in his shows.  Something else that makes it work... and this is true with ANY painting... is to step back and take another look. 

Up close, you smear one color across another... 

And when you step back a couple of paces it's the upper edge of a snow bank.

We do this backstage too.  It's called "The 30 foot rule". That is to say, when you're painting something, and it doesn't 

QUITE look realistic, step back 30 feet or so... 

'Cause that's as close as any audience 

member is gonna get.

And that's when it hit me that I've been doing this kind of painting for quite some time! It's just it was never were on canvas. Well, not unless it was a piece of canvas 

stretched over a 4'x8' frame of 

one by four.  

(((this is the point where once again in the narrative I really regret not having any decent photos of sets I've worked on))) 

When asked what kinda of art I do, 

I generally say drawing. Pencils, pastels, ink... and always 

state that I never painted. Having made now a first attempt at a Bob Ross piece, I now realize that I HAVE been painting... 

it's just that my "paintings" covered a 40'x60' space, 

and were designed to look like something else. 

Until you step back JUST a bit...

and there it is.

It was an exciting, and successful first stab at oils.

There's gonna be more of these. I can feel it in my bones.

And in my Michael's gift card.