My next medium is acrylic paint! In this piece, I followed a Bob Ross painting tutorial except that I used acrylics instead of the oil paints Bob usually uses. It is said that you shouldn’t use acrylics when following Bob’s tutorial, because it doesn’t work well with his ‘wet on wet’ technique. In some ways, it is true; it was harder to follow his techniques using this type of paint, but I liked the challenge of it. Plus I’m not too experienced with oil painting yet so, for now, acrylic is a better match for me, even though I still have a lot to learn.
For those who don’t know Bob Ross, he was a painter that had his own popular television show called The Joy of Painting. Unfortunately, he passed away on July 4th, 1995. His episodes were then re-uploaded onto YouTube and then he blew up when people began the challenge of following his painting tutorials. In fact, I first heard of him through one of those YouTube challenge videos and through the memes people created that were inspired by him. I began to explore his channel and began watched a few of his videos, which made me really want to follow one of his tutorials.
Before I painted this piece, I actually had already followed one of his tutorials. I had bought a bunch of acrylic paints because I had wanted to experiment with them, so I used them to follow his painting. In that piece (pictured above) I didn’t know that the kind of paint would have a different effect so I was upset that it didn’t turn out how I had wanted it to. I’ve learned that I’ll probably never be satisfied with any piece I do because the more I look at it, the more it makes me want to ‘fix it,’ which ends up making it look worse. So I’ve learned to stop once I’ve finished and let the satisfaction drive me to improve and get better. At least, this endless loop allows me to look back and see improvements. [CLICK HERE] to watch some of Bob’s YouTube videos.
In this piece, I used acrylic paints. I also decided to paint on other objects because it’s different than just painting on plain paper. It seemed very fun to paint on different surfaces so I gave it a try. That’s the end of this column here at Sunset Media Wave. Hope you enjoyed my content and maybe it inspired you to give art a try as well? Anyways Thanks for Reading!
