Paint Epic Bob Ross Mountains Use complimentary colors

Hello and welcome back to the studio. Today another Bob Ross classic for you, this time Mountain Seclusion. Now this has got to be one of my most favourite paintings to do and I really enjoyed it. Some might say that I made a few mistakes on the way but you'll see those for yourself. But what makes this painting so very special? Well it's a lot to do with the colour as much as it's to do with the composition. The lovely blues and browns mix so well because they are complementary colours. And if you have yourself one of these little devices it'll tell you that. The blue and the orangey brown tones are directly opposite each other on this colour wheel. They are known as complementary colours. Now I don't know a lot about colour theory because I'm not that clever about it but there are plenty of videos on YouTube and elsewhere that will teach you all about these sorts of things. I just know that some colours tend to work very well with others and a little colour wheel well it could be your best friend so pick yourself one. Now watch my video all the way through because as you know I get myself into a pickle now and then and yes I show you how I get out of my little problems that I make for myself. Also a couple of special guests are appearing in their workaday roles around the studio. I'll leave you to discover that later in the video. So you know the routine. Sit back, relax, colour wheel's at the ready and let's paint mountain seclusion. Happy painting people. So here's my canvas 16 by 20 and I've painted it with black gesso and left it to dry. First thing I want to do is set up the horizon line. I'll use my one inch Bob Ross brush just to do a quick measurement and one of these it's a matte pin. I'll put one in this side and I'll have one on the other side. This will keep my mountain in the right place on the painting. Now I'm going to be using some Bob Ross liquid clear oil paint to prep my canvas. I'll use an old one inch brush with an orange tip of course and I'll be using it from a small airtight container. It's easier to get the brush into it that way. Notice how little I actually use. In fact I'm going to be doing this painting over two days so I'll do the top half first and then I'll leave the bottom half dry. Notice how I test my canvas. When I run my finger over it well there's barely any there but just enough to make it look shiny. Now don't care, dry clean that one inch brush. You don't want to be putting more liquid clear onto the canvas. That black colour is just a bit of the gesso coming off on the bristles. Here's my palette. As you can see quite limited today. I don't want a lot of colours but predominantly blue and orangey browns. So let's get started with blue. This is phthalo blue. As you can see I take a very small amount on my brush. I tap it in well to make sure there's no big blobs. Let's glaze the canvas with colour. Of course you can't see it because well it's blue on black and well it's a transparent blue colour so I need to test it. For this I'm going to use my fingers. As you can see there well more oil than colour. I'll add a bit more and test it again. That's more like it but this time just a thin glaze of blue is what I'm looking for, not really strong blue. Top tip don't forget go right to the edges and corners with this colour or else you'll end up with a grey edge to your painting. I've switched to a nice new Bob Ross brush, courtesy of one of you lovely viewers, and I put a smallest amount of titanium white on the corner of my brush and look at that. Doesn't that jump off the canvas? Well I think I'll go to the other corner and see if I've got a bit less paint now. Notice how I use that sort of whisking action almost like twirling it on the corner of the brush. Here's a nice close up for you. I might paint a bit slower in just a moment just to see how those bristles are really working for me. Again let the colour mix with that blue and try and develop some nice sort of shapes. You're looking for sort of nice sort of bumpy round shapes with a little bit of dark shadow here and there. Once you've had a bit of a go you can always go back and brighten them up but again save a few areas of dark or else you'll just end up painting fog, not clouds. Here we go. Here's a bit of a slow motion for you. I'm just painting a little bit slower than normal. Just notice how the corner of the brush is the only part that's touching. Now let's go back to the bright corner we started with. Now my brush is pretty much clear of any white. I can go back over that area and blend it back into the blue. This is a subtle process and it takes time. Top tip for you though. Can you notice how few of my clouds actually go off the edge of the canvas? This can make your canvas look sort of well artificially smaller. So take a few off the edges and corners. There my painting looks bigger already. Now let's compare my painting to Bob's original. As you can see Bob's background sky is a lot brighter than mine. It means that his mountains really going to show up and I think well maybe this is too dark. So as you saw in that last little sequence I compared Bob's painting against my canvas and I could see that maybe my sky wasn't quite right. But you may not have a reference photograph you can use. Maybe you're doing something from the imagination. So use something else. I've just got an old clipboard here. Black. If I compare that against my clouds you can see well maybe the contrast isn't quite strong enough. My sky and my supposed mountain here are going to really sink into each other a little bit too much. Maybe I need to increase the intensity of light behind the mountain a tiny bit more. A little bit of planning can save you a lot of heartache because I'm sure you, like I, have done many paintings where you realise that maybe something wasn't quite right right at the very beginning. But you don't know that until you get right to the very end of the painting and that can be really upsetting. So do some little double checks before you carry on. I'm going to brighten this up one more time. I've added a second and even a third layer of light colour to my sky. This is what I mean by taking your time. Build it up gently. Keep in mind where the mountain is going to be. Sort of middle left of the centre of the canvas. Here you see me check it with my clipboard again. I think that's just about right now. Time to start work on our mountain. For this I'm going to mix a dark blue colour. Prussian blue, black, a little bit of van dyke brown and some alizarin crimson. And I mix this well. I want a really deep inky blue colour, almost black. If you've watched any of my videos you'll know that I like to plan my paintings a little more than just going in, well, sort of haphazard and hope for the best. So I use the point of my palette knife just to scratch the outline of the mountain. I decide where the light's coming from from the left and when I think I've got it about the right sort of shape I go back in with a clean palette knife and I scrape off the excess paint. This is my next top tip. Remove all the surplus paint you can. It's only going to get in your way later in the painting. Now I've loaded a small amount of that dark inky blue colour onto my palette knife. And notice I put my finger high up on the back of the knife and I press in firmly. I want to stain my canvas. You can see where I scraped off the white so that's not going to cause me any problems. I start off by just using a small roll and then scrape off the excess as I go and then move it around the canvas. I did this entire background for my mountain with three very small rolls of dark blue black paint. Keep on scraping though and remove as much as you can. I use the old one inch brush which had some phthalo blue in it just to finish off the process of removing surplus paint. I keep the darkest darks at the peak of the mountains. I won't worry about that too much we'll get that later on with some highlights. Speaking of which let's mix ourselves up a nice marble mix. Some grubby white, some dark sienna and some van dyke brown. I remember to put some on my palette and notice how loosely I mix these colours. Keep them nice and marbled. I'll take a small roll of that highlighting colour just a small roll. Notice how loosely I hold the knife just with my finger and thumb and I go down and across to the left hand side. That's actually the bright side of this mountain. It's a bit of an odd combination of colours but as I mentioned they're complementary so the highlight is a browny orange tone. Note how loosely I hold that knife. I can't emphasise this enough you want the palette knife just to float across the surface of the painting at a nice angle. Don't have it too flat to the canvas. This painting has probably slightly more sort of confusing angles and edges than normal sort of snowy mountains where we have bright white snow and maybe a bluey grey highlight. This time our highlight colour is brown and it looks a bit sort of back to front. So that last little piece of highlight I put on here looks like it's in the wrong place but you'll see in a moment what I'm going to do. Let's start making a shadow colour and for this again I take a little white, a tiny little bit of phthalo blue colour and a little bit of alizarin crimson. I want a sort of lavender blue colour here but not too bright. Remember this is the shadow side. It also helps if I put the paint on the right side of my knife. Try again that's better on the back of my knife. Now here's a little top tip when I come up against the highlight to the and I put my shadow colour on to the right I like the two to sort of bump into each other a little bit. I like to drag a little bit of one colour over into the other. It sort of helps the painting sort of flow nicely together. Again all these little touches are things I've picked up over the years of teaching and making mistakes. Now let's think about how we can get the little highlight on the right to join that little shadow in the centre and create almost like a little dip in the mountain, a crevasse. Always think about shape and form. Like in here I want again another little sort of crevasse almost, an area where the snow has partly melted but left a nice little sort of dip. I'll do it quite shadowy at this stage and we'll see what we can make of that later on. Here's another little tip for you. If you want your mountain to come forwards in the painting start thinking about how to make a ridge that appears to be coming from the background to the foreground. I have a little highlight on the end here to make it really stand out. Learning to play when you paint is all part of growing your confidence. Don't be afraid to make mistakes and then make changes. It's only by experimenting that you'll grow as an artist and part of that growth is watching other artists work. So if you enjoy my videos don't forget give my channel a little thumbs up, that's a like. You can also subscribe. Don't forget ring the little bell icon that way you get a little notification every time I drop a new video on my channel. I try and put one on once a week. Let's add a little snow to the lowlands of my mountain. As you can see I've used a very grubby white colour here just to touch that lavender in it and think about how you use your knife just to sort of shape and form the snow. Notice I start with my knife at an angle and sort of curve. I want the paint to look like it's sort of laying on the lower slopes of this mountain. Use your knife to sculpt. It sounds a bit sort of odd but really that's what we're doing with paint. We're sort of sculpting with it. You'll notice how my paint breaks across the canvas. I keep my handle nice and high and steep. It means that the paint that's on there just catches the tops of some of the canvas. I just want to reshape this slightly. It was a bit too sort of pointy and maybe remember that little shadowy area we did in the background? I'll try and bring these two areas together so it looks like that little area is sitting further back. It was a bit of luck wasn't it? Maybe I planned it that way. I think this area also needs a little touch of highlight. The other reason why I'm doing this is because I want my painting to be sort of like a visual journey from the foreground to the background. I'm laying in what's known as a light trail so your eye is taken to the back of the painting. I'll add a few little touches of sort of thawing snow to the crest of this mountain as well. Let's have a closer look at my mountain. There are a couple of areas which I think need some attention. Do you notice there's a very dark outline around my mountain? I sometimes see this on my own paintings where I've not quite gone high enough with my highlighting and my shadow and it makes the painting look sort of well like it's part of another painting. Like it's been sort of cut out of another picture and stuck on. So here's a top tip. Go back and break up a few of those dark edges. Have a look at your own mountains and make sure your highlights and shadows touch the sky. It's a small touch but I think makes a huge difference to your painting. I also think this line here looks a bit sort of straight so again an easy little touch here is just to drop a bit of the dark shadow colour we started with. Just put a few breaks in it. It doesn't take much. A little bit of shadow, a touch of snow and once again you increase the quality of your painting with just a few touches of colour and highlight. I continue adding layers of highlights and shadows and snowy banks to my painting. Keep the knife high and let that paint really break and if you get any really big chunks of snow like I have here then just run your knife across it a few times and drag the paint out. For the final stage of my painting I've gone back to my nice one-inch brush. It's got just a tiny little bit of blue left on it from doing the sky and I just want to tap out this lower edge and create sort of a nice misty effect and with a few gentle strokes I think my mountain is complete. So my painting's coming along quite nicely but there is a problem. Do you remember I put the horizon line in there so that I didn't run out of position and well lo and behold I've sunk lower than expected but I was having fun with my mountain and that was the main thing to have some fun but there is a temptation now to want to cram everything in. I've got to try and get a cabin in there, three trees on the right, two trees on the left, water, some snow and a bear having a picnic in the background. Maybe you should leave a few items out now. After all this has really become quite a big feature hasn't it. So my advice is don't stuff your painting now. Put a few nice items in and if there's room at the end and you want to squeeze a little cabin in that's fine but try and finish your painting off with a little bit more simplicity. Anyway on with the painting. I come back to my painting on the next day and of course this lower section has no liquid clear or any colour on it so I quickly start off with some phthalo blue and some liquid clear exactly as I did for the sky. Apply it thinly and test it. I've stood back and decided what I want to try and do is to use that little bright peak of snow on the right hand side and to sort of make that part of the mid ground. So I'm using my nice one inch brush with a little touch of highlighting on it here just to sort of extend it forwards. It gives me a bright area against which I can paint the next layer which I think should be some sort of shadow trees. Again I'm borrowing elements of Bob's original painting but I'm not being such a slave to it I just take what I think would work. Now against that light colour I want to put in just a few little markers. I loaded my fan brush very well with this lovely dark mountain colour and put on these little marks to give you sort of an idea of a line but don't forget paint through some of the background detail as well. Again this helps with depth and distance in your painting. Let's give you a slightly better angle. I've tipped my camera to one side here and all I'm doing is I'm striking downwards with the top corner of my fan brush. Use those little guide markers they'll keep you out of trouble and stop you over painting. One or two of these little trees though need a bit more detail. Notice how I hold my fan brush on a corner and just gently tap downwards to create the silhouette of a little fir tree. As Bob would say give my little friend add two or three but don't overdo it. Remember these are supposed to be in the mid ground so they're a ways away back in the painting. Bob was also a master of using misty effects and that's what I'm going to do here. I've gone back into some of that light colour with my nice one inch brush and notice I'm using probably more of a corner of my brush to do this just to tap in some highlighting colours here some light sort of lavendery colours. I just want to diffuse that lower edge and create some depth and distance. Things that are further away tend to be less defined so using this misty effect pushes the trees back. Gently lift up some mist between the trees and here's a neat little trick you can actually pull some of the tree trunks down into the mist so they've got a nice sort of crossover. Again little touches and tricks that you pick up the more you paint things I've learned along the way. I've got a second fan brush which I load with some off-white colour quite a bluish tone and you know what's coming next yes I'm going to add some snow to my painting. This was one of the effects that really got me hooked on painting the Bob Ross style. I saw Bob put snow under some fir trees and I was absolutely amazed how easy it looked to add so much detail just a few strokes. Now let's continue that light trail effect I was talking about. If you follow the line of the mountain into the foreground I want to just increase the brightness down here in the corner but I think I'll add another feature there as well. I've gone back through some of that off-white colour and I want to add some brightness to the surface of the water. Again I go sort of right of centre here a little bit with my colour. I want it to be brighter on the right and dark on the left. Once again I want this to look like it's part of a light trail from the foreground to the background. If I reload my brush with fresh colour I always go back to that central area. Try clean your brush and then just brush gently across. Don't overdo it though it's very easy to make this look more like a smudge. Took a bit of a stand back from my painting and think that I really need to increase the brightness here on this right hand side. I do it gently, progressively. I take my time, stand back, have a good look, stand back and then go back and add a little more brightness. Now for a few frosty water lines. I've added a small amount of that titanium white paint on the edge of my palette knife. Again it's not pure white, it's off-white. For this area here on the right I've used a small blade of my knife and just let the paint sort of scrub into the canvas a little bit. I'm just about to make a bit of a blunder. You see I went back and looked at Bob's painting and he had these lovely icy cold white trees in his painting. I thought I need to try that but they didn't fit my painting very well at all. In fact they were more of a distraction. They were taking my eye away from my light trail that I've been working on so hard. So no, after a while I decided time for the palette knife and you know me, I take off things that don't quite work because I know I can fix it and that's something you should learn to do on your own paintings. A few taps with a one-inch brush, a few strokes of the knife, put some snow back in and just add a little bit more highlight to this background bank. I still want to put some trees there but maybe not those bright frosty ones. A little bit of snow and you'd never know that I'd been in a pickle. I think what I want is some of the darker trees again but maybe a bit bigger so I deliberately paint them through this line. I bring them lower down in the painting. It brings them closer to me in the scene. Once again I start with the centre line and just using the corner of my fan brush I tap downwards. Use the bristles of the brush to make the little pine needles. It's an easy technique but does require a little practice. I'll add a second tree just to make it sort of fit in nicely with the background and then maybe one on the very edge here just to tidy that up. I'll add some small amounts of highlights that later on. Now I want a nice big feature tree here on the right hand side, one that really comes forward in my painting. Again I start off with some of the dark colour as an underpainting but I don't put too much on here. I want my underpainting to be dark but not too thick and heavy. I'm going to be putting some nice bright highlights on this so I've got some titanium white, a touch of phthalo blue in it and a touch of liquid clear. This makes the paint slightly thin and it makes it stick easy to a dark underpainting. Once again think about that light trail and how the light shining across the mountain catches these lovely fir trees. So I'm going here with very bright colours, probably a little bit artificially bright but heck it's my world and I have them as I want. I'll tone down that colour just a bit with some more phthalo blue for the shadow side of my tree. So this is more the centre and the right hand side. I want this tree to really stand out so I keep its shadow just slightly blue. The big tree, the same treatment, maybe not quite as bright. Again stand back and judge how bright you want your trees to be. For the trees in the background here though I'm definitely keeping them more subdued so the blue colour I'm using there a little bit more. I think I'll just add just a few sparklers on this tree, a little bit of almost pure titanium white colour, still not completely white but almost. I like to keep that last little touch of highlight available for any finishing touches. I just need a few more strokes of the brush just to put some snow under my trees, tidy things up in the corner and then a little bit more of that frost. I could do just a bit more detail here, maybe just some little frozen grasses and some seed heads from seasons past. I found trying to do those tops of my fir trees a bit tricky. My fan brush wasn't in very good shape so I'll just touch them up with the end of my liner brush. With that I think we have a finished painting. Mountain Seclusion, a Bob Ross classic with a few touches and twists from yours truly. So there you have it, Mountain Seclusion, another Bob Ross classic. But if you've enjoyed me painting this mountain scene, there's another one coming right along. Happy painting people!