r/bobross

Been painting since 2017, learned exclusively through The Joy of Painting and just messing around. Finally got up the courage to put a few paintings in a gallery for a local art show.

This is the 7th DVD from Bobs 1 hour instructional video. It is called Times Past. Here I took a little bit of liberty to change things from the original.

First, I don’t like evidence of people in my paintings. The original had a barn/cabin thing and some fencing. I omitted those and dropped in a boulder.

Also, Bob had a bare tree on the left side. I omitted this for now. He’s hanging out with a 18 x 24 canvas where I am hanging out with an 16 x 20. I am trying to be smart about not over crowding. But as in most cases, I am sure if I had an additional 4 inches, things would be much better. Pun intended.

What I learned: if a boulder if looking good, playing with it doesn’t make it look better. I should have stopped sooner when my stone still have some flat edges and right angles. Less if more is a theme I am seeing here.

Well, hope you all like it. I’m not mad at this one. Nor disappointed.

Recently got into oil painting and this was the first bash! Oils are harder than I anticipated! Fun though 🌳

5th try at Bob Ross painting. “Hide a way Cove”

Just finished this one

I attended a class at “Serenity in Color” in Henderson, TN. This is my result. I’m extremely happy with my efforts and the instructor.

This is yet another one off of his Bobs 1 hour set of 1 hour tutorials.

I wish I would have taken more time on the trees and I feel they aren’t very even. And I still hate bushes. I really like the and middle ground. The rest, not so much. Bottom left of the foreground is where I think this whole painting fell apart.

Well, you live and you learn.

Finished this one last night. It is from Bobs 1 hour DVD set. A couple of things:

1. I read a post that someone put his/her titanium white on cardboard for a bit to soak up excess oil from the paint. When it came time to put snow on mountains, it would break more easily. This technique absolutely crushed it. Love it and it works. If you have trouble, try it out.
2. I purposely left ample mist area to show distance. I feel the background and foreground are my best to date. Atmospheric and “hazy”. I also feel my reflections are pretty convincing.
3. My foreground is still a sore point for me at this stage, although I may have figured out (albeit too late) what my issues with highlights may be. I think I am too cheap with how much paint I load on my brush. My first couple of bushes or tree highlights come out great and then it goes to shit real fast. I think I just don’t put enough paint in the brush. I am just trying to stretch what is on my pallet as far as I can so I don’t end up with unused paint at the end.

I will test my theory this weekend and see if my suspicions are correct.

Thanks for looking and reading. Advise and kind words are appreciated.

Water Lilies in Prague-Komořany (2021) 🪷🌿⚜️

I painted this at the end of May 2021, inspired by a real place in Prague-Komořany — a protected natural area with a beautiful pond filled with water lilies.

One beautiful day, around midday, I went there for a walk. The sun was shining, the water was almost perfectly still, and everything around me was incredibly peaceful. It was the kind of silence that doesn't feel empty at all — it feels alive.

The pond was covered with water lilies, surrounded by tall grasses and lush greenery. I watched a duck with her ducklings, saw nutrias nearby, and all around me this little natural world was simply going on with its life, almost untouched by the city surrounding it.

There was also a large piece of wood lying in the water. It was such an ordinary little detail, but somehow it stayed in my memory, so I included it in the foreground of the painting. I wanted to remember the place as I had experienced it — wild, overgrown and natural.

What fascinated me most was the stillness of the water and the sunlight.

I remember the colours so vividly — the blues and turquoise of the water, all those fresh shades of green, and the pink water lilies appearing like little islands of colour among them. I wanted to bring some of that beauty and joy of colour onto the canvas.

When I painted it, I wasn't trying to make a photographic copy of the place. I wanted to capture something more important to me: how it felt to be there that day — the light, the colours, the silence and that incredible sense of peace.

This is something I love about Prague. You can still be in a large city and suddenly find yourself standing beside quiet water, surrounded by water lilies, watching ducklings and nutrias, and for a moment feel as though the city doesn't exist at all.

That is the feeling I brought home with me that day.

Silence. Sunlight. Still water. Water lilies. And nature quietly living its own life.

I wanted to keep a little piece of that moment on my canvas. 🪷☀️🌿

Prague-Komořany, late May 2021.

Painting always calms me. When I paint, it feels almost like repeating a mantra. With this painting, I became so absorbed in it that I painted the whole day and completely forgot that I was here.

In my imagination, I was there instead.

I imagined myself walking among the sakura trees, looking at the mountain and the water, surrounded by this peaceful landscape. For a while, the real world simply disappeared.

That's what painting can do to me. I don't just paint a place — sometimes I feel like I enter it.

Sakurový ráj (2024) 🌸

Tento obraz jsem namalovala v roce 2024.

Malování mě vždycky uklidňuje. Když maluji, je to pro mě skoro jako opakování mantry. U tohoto obrazu jsem se do malování ponořila natolik, že jsem malovala celý den a úplně zapomněla, že jsem tady.

Ve své představě jsem totiž byla tam.

Představovala jsem si, jak procházím mezi sakurami, dívám se na horu a vodu a jsem obklopená tou klidnou krajinou. Na chvíli skutečný svět jednoduše zmizel.

Přesně to se mnou malování někdy dělá. Nemaluji jen nějaké místo — někdy mám pocit, jako bych do něj sama vstoupila.

The Red Grove (2022) ❤️☀️

This painting was born from the pure joy of painting.

I had just bought new paints and had this enormous canvas in front of me, approximately 115 × 80 cm. The size of it alone excited me. I wanted to paint without limitations — I used brushes, experimented with different techniques, and sometimes simply painted with my hands. I let the colours and my imagination guide me.

The place in this painting does not actually exist. I have never been there, and I didn't use any reference. The entire landscape came from my imagination — the red grove, the winding path, the distant forests, the mountains, and the world that seems to continue somewhere far beyond them.

But the most important part for me was the sun.

I thought of it as Savitur — the life-giving energy of the Sun. I didn't want it to be simply a sun painted in the sky. I wanted it to carry a sense of energy and power. And while I was painting, I felt an incredible amount of that energy myself. It was almost as though the painting was giving something back to me while I was creating it.

That is still what I love most about this piece. When I look at it, I don't feel as though I'm looking at an imaginary landscape. I feel as though I could step onto that path, walk through the red grove, continue towards the blue forest in the distance… and then keep going to whatever lies beyond it.

This place doesn't exist.

And yet, sometimes I feel as though I've been there.

The Red Grove, 2022