Mountain Pencil Drawing Honoring Bob Ross

 

For this week’s blog, I am going to write about a drawing that is still in progress. Coming off vacation last week, I just seemed to run out of time to get it completed. Truth to be told, after finishing up the barn drawing, I could not figure out what I wanted to draw next. While still in the hotel in Raleigh NC, I literally sat and stared at a blank piece of paper for 30 to 40 minutes on Sunday morning. It like having writers’ block but for drawing.  Anyway, after a long while I decided to just start experimenting to see what would happen.  

My inspirations came from a magazine. While I was in Raleigh NC, I had visited the local Barns and Nobel Book store looking for additional art reference books, (You can never have too many). Anyway, I was really disappointed on their selection of art references. However, I did find a magazine featuring the life of Bob Ross. Now I am a huge fan the “Joy of Painting” show and have watched it since it was originally on PBS back in the 80’s.  In thinking about the Bob Ross paintings, I started to wonder how I could reproduce something similar in pencil. Still not know entirely what directions I was going to go, I started to see if I could first create the clouds that Bob normally had in the sky of his paintings.

To create the sky, I took an egg-shaped makeup sponge and some graphite power and just smeared it along the top of the paper. Then using a kneadable eraser, I started creating clouds shapes by erasing some of the graphite power. In a short period of time, I had a sky filled with clouds. Continuing this line of thought, I added more graphite power to the paper below the clouds. Then taking a stick eraser, I started to create the shape of snow-covered mountains by erasing the graphite, being careful to use angles that would represent the mountain slopes. Overall, the effect seemed to work well.

Then tragedy hit. I ran out of time and the trip to North Carolina came to an end and I had to drive back home and to reality. The good news was that I did plan an extra day of vacation as a transition day before going back to the insanity of my normal job. Anyway, I used that day to put in a couple of “Happy little Trees” as Bob Ross would say. For those that have watched the Bob Ross’ painting show, he loved to place one or two trees in the foreground of his painting to give them the feeling of depth. The theory, the practice works the same in pencil drawing, so I added the trees. 

For my pencil drawings, I love to get caught up in the details. In doing so, many of my drawings take 10, 20, or 30+ hours to complete depending on the subject. Unlike the 30-minute paintings Bob would create on his PBS show.  Sadly, this is where my vacation came to an end and where I will end the blog for this week. Next week, I will have the second part of this blog and hopefully a completed drawing to share with everyone.

I will close with a modified quote that Bob Ross always used at the end of each of his painting shows. “Happy drawing and God Bless.”