Bob Ross Spray Paint Portrait | Mural tutorial

Welcome to another video. If you're new to the channel my name is Noah and this channel is all about improvement and creativity and if that's something you're interested in consider subscribing. In this video we have something that I've been wanting to do for for quite some time now and that's a spray paint portrait tutorial and we got the the legend the goat himself Bob Ross on deck. Never never painted him before so I'm quite excited to to get into it but there's a few videos on YouTube at the moment with some solid information but I feel like I can add a little bit to the conversation so that's what we're going to try and do today so yeah let's get into it. Now one thing we need to speak about in terms of mural painting is scale and this is a question I get asked often is how do you take something on a piece of paper and blow it up to be on a larger scale and it's relatively simple actually you can do a grid and one one easy grid is like a doodle grid and there's actually tons of videos already on YouTube about the doodle grid specifically so pretty much you draw a bunch of scribbles on the wall take a picture of it throw it in Photoshop throw it in Procreate on your iPad drop the transparency drop the opacity and put it on top of the picture you're trying to paint or vice versa and then you can see kind of where the eye intersects and where this nose would intersect and then you can just use that as a grid to map everything out or you can use a projector something that if you have the luxury to do I definitely recommend there's little room for error it'll save you so much time and you can be confident knowing that if you projected it right and square and everything that everything's going to be in the right place and it's just going to save you so much time but ideally if if I had my my pick I'd Before we throw any paint on the wall I want to talk about the most important thing to spray painting a good portrait and that's just learning how to to draw a good portrait or paint a good portrait on a canvas and I know that seems like a cop-out and like an easy answer but if you know how to render something on a piece of paper on a canvas you're going to have no trouble doing it There is a learning curve to learning how to spray paint but that's like the least of your issues when we're trying to paint on a larger scale so knowing how to to draw and and see features on on any scale will be the greatest key in in painting a spray painting portrait. In 2019 I actually set out a goal at the beginning January 1st I told myself I was going to draw a portrait a day for the entire year and I was unsuccessful in that goal but I still ended up doing around 200 portraits every day sitting down to draw someone new and it has aided me so much like I can't I probably can't even like quantify how much that's affected my and improved my my practice so that's going to be the foundation before you put any paint on the wall focus on what you can see and how you can bring to life what you see and there there's tons of great portrait videos out there on YouTube that just talk about portraiture in general but we are going to get into some spray paint specific tips and tricks for for specifically the craft of spray painting but I just wanted to to lay that foundation just knowing how to see features and render things will be a great help in trying to spray paint so all right let's talk about color and when you talk about color in terms of spray painting you also got to talk about cans the biggest challenge when you spray paint is going to be controlling the speed that the paint comes out of the cap and that's why you want to use low pressure cans so essentially there's like various types of spray paints and they put like propellant inside the can which makes it either come out fast or slow and a high pressure one is like going to push paint out quickly it's just going to like blast paint all over the wall so if you want to cover a large area you want to use high pressure but when you're painting portraits and when you're painting fine details the low pressure is going to give you more control and more ability to just get in there and yeah have can control which is going to be the biggest curve in spray painting specifically so Montana Gold is a good brand my favorite brand we also got Montana 94 when picking your colors you want to just be constantly looking at your reference image this just kind of backs up my my earlier statement that if you know how to paint a normal portrait picking the colors in spray painting is just going to be that much easier so I like to arrange my workspace before I get started and I always work from dark to light so I'll put everything on this table make sure everything has a cap so we'll throw caps on these guys because caps is a huge part of painting and these guys are called skinny creams they let out a small amount of paint but that that I can go on a tangent about caps just loading up this table and we'll keep it pushing so so last night I went ahead and shot this up with a projector as you can see we got the eye right here an eyebrow major outline of the face obviously we got the fro in there just knock that out save like I said save so much time and it's a perfect segue to talk about one of the most important elements in a good painting and that's the drawing there's four basic elements to painting drawing color value and edges and drawing is going to be the foundation say I was to paint this portrait with the perfect color the skin tone is on point the values are perfect the edges are right everything is just perfect but this eye is just a little bit to the right and the nose is too far down it's not going to look like Bob Ross as small as these lines are as seemingly unimportant as these lines are this is the foundation that you're going to build upon make sure starting out that you take the time to get this right that's why a projector is just so so valuable just allows you to nail it the first time in practicing so much you definitely will be able to do this without a projector it's just going to take you I don't know anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to get everything right get everything where you want it to be and that's an hour that you could be working on something else so it's time to suit up safety first boys and girls so time to get started we've got a reference photo right here another tip pro tip in terms of mural painting specifically you're going to want to print out your reference picture I used to work off my ipad off my phone and although you can make do when you print it out there's no glare if you're working in the sun out in the elements you have to worry about keeping your phone clean or the glare that the sun's going to put on your phone this no glare you can see all the colors it's larger than if it was on your ipad or your phone and it's just overall better experience you can throw it it's lighter so definitely definitely definitely print out your reference picture so you can have it on hand this is just a foam core print the picture out at any local shop spray adhesive sticking on there good to go definitely do that um but yeah let's get started but before we do that make sure you shake your cans it always says on the can shake for two to three minutes and then you like want to get started so you don't actually do it shake your can it's going to make your life um so about like an hour a little under an hour and a half in and just kind of blocking in things doing like general areas um yeah just getting like a lay of the land so you can kind of get an idea and then you can push the details more and refine it as you as you uh continue to work but one thing i wanted to mention is when you paint at all but especially on this scale you want to always get perspective and step back and compare that to what you're doing so i'll consistently like i'll do like one stroke and then step back compare it to the reference and then walk back up boom boom boom take a step back again and you can also like put it to the exact scale so right here if you kind of compare the eyes you can see they're kind of the same size you can uh just look back and forth notice some differences right now a lot of the wrinkles are going to be too prominent so i like to paint a lot of that stuff earlier and then you can just like go over it with some some dust some of the spray and it'll like push them back make them more subtle make them more realistic but yeah just definitely wanted to mention to continuously step back throughout the process because you can be like super close in here and think something looks great and then you step back and it just looks like complete garbage so make sure you consistently get perspective so let's get back to it that's the name of the game it's enjoying really already enjoy what you do in life if you do then you'll do a good job and i certainly enjoy what i'm doing i spent half my life doing somebody else's thing painting should make you happy it does nothing else it shouldn't make you happy and if it doesn't make you happy you're doing the wrong thing because it's fun and if you can do things all of your life that make you happy needless to say you're going to be a happy person okay now we can wash the old brush and if you've painted with me before you know this is the fun part of this whole technique we wash our brushes with odorless thinner shake them off and just beat the devil out of them and that's where you take out all your hostilities and frustrations and it's a lot of fun time is 6 30 i've been working on this for approximately six hours and it's at the point where i like to not necessarily call it but take a step back for a good amount of time so i'll take a picture of it and analyze it on my phone and on the computer compare it to the reference photo come back tomorrow and finish it off so pretty happy with where it is right now i'm excited to compare and contrast and see how we can continue to push it that much further because that's the goal always like i always say improvement creativity and improvement so always trying to improve yeah we're going to wrap it up for today and then we'll see you tomorrow to cap off the video and give you my my final tips and tricks and uh yeah see you then okay after taking some time to look at it a couple things one the inside of this eye needs to be pushed back just like one stop in value so i sprayed that with a little bit of transparent black just to push it back a little bit just this uh white part right here the shape of the face is off and there's not really much i can do about that without repainting the whole beard this eyebrow needs to be lighter as well so i hit that you can kind of see right here yeah that was pretty much it it's the little things like that that really make it pop so subtlety like i always say is key in realism so yeah this is the the last portrait on this wall i'm excited to kind of wrap it up and tie everything together although i feel like i did my best to try to explain what's going on practice is going to be the most important thing so take what you learn from any particular video from this video from anyone else on youtube or anyone else that you encounter and apply it to your own practice like comment share subscribe all that good stuff when you do so it helps the channel and lets you to know that this is content that other people want to watch so we can grow the channel but definitely enjoying the process of making these videos trying to share what little knowledge i've gained so far to this point yeah if you could do that it'd be greatly appreciated as always but we're going to keep it pushing and i'll see you in the next one peace