Bob Ross lied

In episode 2607, Bob spends nearly the entire episode gushing about how easy the painting is and how even your grandma could do it. Perfect for beginners. Well he was lying. It's a fairly difficult painting requiring tree proficiency and snow building expertise. I'm from the south and I have to guess what snow looks like.

You start by painting tree shapes with gessos and then you come back with your oils and fill in the snow and shading. The first time I tried making the trees they were fat and straight and practically uniform. I sanded the gesso down and started over to get something I sort of liked before moving on to the oil stage.

I had a hard time getting the snow to look halfway decent. Bob put some in the background to look like the snow was fading away into darkness. When I tried to do that I nearly ruined the painting. Fortunately, oil is forgiving and mistakes can be improved upon, if not rectified. Instead of snow fading to darkness, my forest looks like it's in a heavy fog.

This painting is more labor intensive than regular wet on wet because it has to be done in stages with drying time and brush washing in between. I'd prefer to just paint the whole thing at once.

Who would have thought...

...to bondo a sewing machine? I didn't like the results I was getting with my paint layers. They were not going on smooth and many, many casting flaws were still obvious. While it's true that I have worked on a lot of cars, I never worked on the OUTSIDES. I don't know a thing about shiny smooth finishes. I finally asked for advice from a guy in Florida who does amazing finishes on Featherweights professionally. He helped me understand what I've been doing wrong.

To rectify the problem, I bought more oven cleaner and stripped the machine down again. This time proved to be significantly more difficult than the first. Then I primed and sanded it twice and then bondoed it:

That pink rash is all casting flaws. They were showing up as craters in the black paint. The black stuff is where the metal is showing through after sanding off the surplus bondo. The surface is very smooth and another coat of primer will reveal any flaws I missed. I probably don't have another coat of primer left in my spray can. This project is starting to get expensive.

Forgot about this one

I did this one several weeks ago from a Wilson Bickford video.

I think this is the first one I've done that I would consider good, even though some parts of it didn't come out to my liking, like the blue in the sky. In general, I'm pleased. I'm really starting to enjoy painting now that I'm beginning to understand how all the parts work.

The one real disappointment I have with this painting is that the sunglow isn't bright enough. In the example, the trees were lighter and the bright spot whiter, such that I instinctively squinted when I looked at it, as if I really was looking at the setting sun.

Mother's Day gift for Mum

I whipped this up after lunch to give as a Mother's Day present. It's a little 6x6 copy of an almost-painting Wilson Bickford did to illustrate his line of paint brushes.

Whatever hobby is currently captivating my interest when a gift giving occasion comes around is usually what people get from me, good or bad. It's not great, but she'll be impressed anyway.

People were giving me grief about not signing my paintings so I tried signing one. I think it was better without it. I actually meant to use black for the signature, but after watching hundreds of episodes of Joy of Painting, I instinctively went for Bright Red.