Unboxing The Bob Ross Master Paint Set

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ART SUPPLY DEALER (slapping the side of the box): "You know, you can fit a lot of art and happy accidents in this bad boy!"

This is a Christmas gift whose impression will endure for me. The Brown Eyed Girl secured, for misbegotten me, the Bob Ross Master Paint Set. Now, I've always been ambivalent about oils and have found something of a home in acrylics, and still aspire to watercolors. But oils always have held a fascination, and, as millions of ASMR addicts around the world do, get my fill of Bob Ross half-hours when the opportunity presents itself. 

Although I always have promised myself if I get the materials I'd try a Ross Method painting. Well, that day has come, though not immediately-immediately. I'll explain presently.

The set came to me in a box like this, here. Ever wanted to see what's in one of these bad boys? Well, follow along as I take the first step on a journey into the world of happy accidents. The box:

16 PCS, the box design exults. The graphics along the bottom give you an idea of the general classes of things one'd expect to find inside, but, for the record the sixteen items are as follows;

• 8 37ml tubes of Bob Ross landscape oil colors: titanium white, cadmium yellow, bright red, alizarin crimson, phthalo blue, sap green, Van Dyke brown, and midnight black
• 1 100ml bottle of liquid white
• 1 2" background brush (the world famous two inch brush)
• 1 1" landscape brush
• 1 #6 fan blender brush
• 1 #2 script liner (the only tool for signing your painting, as we Ross fans know)
• 1 #10 painting knife
• 1 instruction book
• 1 DVD 

Sixteen easy pieces. The DVD, for what it's worth, contains a 1-hour painting lesson from Bob, ostensibly doing the painting depicted on the box, Mountain Summit. The instructional book leads you through in the step-by-step Bob Ross style, emphasizing that Bob, in his video, will call for colors you do not have but the book hastens to inform you that the version presented in the book does not need the colors Bob employs and will work with what they've given you.

Removing the box top, we see approximately this:

Fourteen of the sixteen items in the set are visible immediately, two of them, the DVD and the instructional book, are beneath the clear plastic tray. The empty space on the right hand side, shaped similarly to the space that holds the bottle of Liquid White, made me think that maybe an item was omitted in some way from the package, but comparing the items inside to the list on the back of the box confirmed that nothing was missing. Presumably this design allows them to pack a number of different configurations without having to stock a bunch of different inserts. A bit confusing for the observant customer, but no big deal really.

Seeing all those Bob Ross colors makes me feel good.

In the photo above, the brushes provided. From left: #10 painting knife, the world-famous 2-inch brush, the #6 Fan blender, the 1-inch brush, the #2 script liner. All the basic instruments of construction.

The observant will recognize that there are a couple of things I don't have displayed here: a palette and, as important as that and more, a canvas. We shall be purchasing a canvas in due course. I have, apparently against this very occurrence, saved an official Bob Ross acrylic plastic palette in all its oversized glory, provided (how else?) via the aegis of the legendary I've Been Framed-Art Supply Center. And easels? Around here, we got easels.

So, I get myself a canvas and make sure I have some odorless thinner, and I'm as good as ready to go here. 

But you know, speaking as a long time art supply collector, it's nice just to have them. But also I have long wanted to try out a Bob painting. And here's my chance. More as the situation develops.

The Bob Ross Paint-by-Number Triptych

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So, here's the final result of doing the three tiny numberless paint-by-number works in the Bob Ross By The Numbers kit.

... a mountain scene, Bob's iconic portrait, and a covered bridge. Just like Bob's paintings, the style lends itself to freedom if you just go with it. 

Each one of the pictures has an instructional diagram. The colors to be used are keyed to numbers in the diagram and you are given the seven colors to mix as you will. As noted before, the numbers on the diagram were actually left off the panels, and you could write the numbers on, say, with pencil, if you wanted, but the pictures are not all that complex and, with just a couple of oopsies, I was able to refer to the diagrams to put the colors in the right places.

Also, recall that, despite depicting above the colors and brush included with the kit, I did not use them. Anyone who wants to get this kit, I recommend using closely corresponding colors from elsewhere, even if they're cheapo acrylic pots from the craft store or craft acrylic. Get the colors as close as you can then mix. The colors in the kit are kind of a mockery of Bob's work; poor quality materials make the work hard due to the frustration and energy expended in working round the issues those poor quality materials cause. There's no joy in painting with these lousy-quality acrylics in hard-to-open and close, tiny pots. 

The brush is cute though.

What A Difference A Paint Makes (Painting A Very Small Bob Ross, By The Numbers, Round 2)

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In the immediately-previous missive, I tried painting the PBN style tiny Bob Ross portrait from the set Bob Ross By The Numbers, and documented the results which, while fun, were pretty sad.

Despite using my own brushes (the only things PBN brushes are good for are spreading masking fluid then discarding) the effort was doomed by the low-low-low quality paints included in the kit. Packaged in small, hard-to-open plastic pots, it mixed poorly and flowed even worse. You may follow this link to the previous entry if you're too pandemic-tired to scroll down, if you must. I was okay to settle for the result as I wasn't trying to reproduce La Giaconda after all, just have a bit of fun. But! The Brown Eyed Girl informed me, post-painting, that she wanted to scan this so she could color it in on the computer in Photoshop. 

No longer possible! Oh, well ... we just got us another from I've Been Framed (they're cheap, as they say, at twice the price ... about $10 at IBF, probably even less when you buy on-line). And she scanned them and has them as a digital file and colored on in the 'shop and it does look quite nice. Also, I was able to try something I wanted to try.

It's said, by more than one authority, that, when given the chance, one should spend as much as able when buying art supplies such as paint and brushes. The savings in aggravation and having to cope with (and replace) bad-quality materials alone is supposedly worth it. And there are quality differences between student quality and serious hobbyist quality and professional quality. The aspiring artist frequently does not have the experience on embarking to really make a confident choice and lowballs it, only to spend a little more next time. 

I'm being a bit melodramatic; you're not buying a car here, after all. But it means something because the less aggravation over your materials the more likely an art habit won't be dropped early. What of the quality question, though? Does it make that much of a difference? This experiment shows that it does, and I'll prove it, starting here.

Now, PBN acrylics aren't renowned for their high quality no matter who you buy it from. Some are better than others; Royal & Langnickel are just acceptable and Paint Works are pretty fair, for PBN, but none of them are ever going to be confused with Grumbacher or Liqutex Basic. The quality of the acrylics in the Bob Ross By The Numbers set, though, is bad enough on their own; the producer of the set should publicly apologize to the Bob Ross estate for putting the Ross name on a box containing them. 

What if I found comparable Paint Works PBN colors and tried them? I've had good experience with them, they mix and flow well. To the morgue! The thing about PBNs is you'll frequently have leftover paint, and I keep them, morgue-file style, in a box. The Bob Ross kit came with seven colors: a blue, a red, a green, a yellow, a brown, white and black. Could I find approximate replacements in the paint morgue?

... yes, as it turned out, I could. The tall pots in the back row are from old Paint Works kits; the small ones in the foreground were the ones from the Bob Ross kit. 

That front row may now exeunt; they shall not be heard from again.

I proceed as before. For Bob's face, hair, skin, and parts of the brush as directed, I used brown; highlight tone was a tinted brown, pure brown for the middle tone, and shaded brown for the dark tones. 

Then I proceeded to the blues. there was a light blue, a dark blue, and a blue-gray. As with the brown I mixed white and black to get the tint and the shade, and let the pure blue dominate the sky. Perhaps I should have tinted the dark blue a bit to lighten that sky up, but I'm looking at the finished product and I'm still okay with it. 

There were two greens; the pure green for the light green areas and a shaded green for the dark green areas. Filling those in, the painting is complete.

The result looks pretty good, given the limits of the materials and the context of the form. But where the real point of the whole pursuit becomes plain when the two paintings are compared side-by-side, as does the relative quality of the paint:

What sort of difference even a minimal increase in quality make? All the difference in the world, really. Mixing, flow, coverage ... it's blindingly obvious. 

Painting A Very Small Bob Ross, By The Numbers

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So, I took out one of those teeny-tiny Bob Ross PBNs and I did it. And I couldn't resist, I wanted to save the Bob portrait until last, but my compulsion just wasn't having that.

The skin and hair tones were noted as 1, 2, 3, in order from light to dark. One of the seven colors is a brown color; for the lighter ones, I tinted the brown, for the darker, I shaded.

Then came the blue of the sides of the mountains toward the light and the bluish white of Bob's shirt. I took the blue that came with the kit and tinted again.

The parts of the mountains in shadow as well as the highlights of Bob's shirt were created of a gray with just enough blue to make it bias the blue's direction. 

Unlike most PBNs, abutting regions were colored with the same color. That was a bit of a distraction, but not near as much as the suckyness of the paint, which refused to flow evenly. That's a bit of a thing that you run into with PBNs, but this really pushed it.

Finishing off with a pure blue for the sky and other appropriate areas, and a pure green and a shaded green for the tow different intensities of green the diagram called for.

I was the most unhappy with Bob's hair. the unevenness of flow really did a bad job there, so I made another shade fo brown and overlayed the paint already there. By improving the contrast between the hair and the background, it actually improved this a bit.

It ain't pretty, but it can live up by by Funko POP! Bob Ross. They'll make famous friends. 

I Found A Bob Ross Paint-By-Number Set. It Is Very Small.

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It would stand to reason that my affection for PBN and my ongoing fondness for Bob Ross would eventually cross paths. Actually, as big as Bob has gotten, more than 25 years after his death (he died in 1995 and the last The Joy of Painting episode aired the day after my birthday in 1994 ... I myself only discovered Bob after he'd passed on) and as adept as BRI has been at marketing his memory (some say he's bigger than Andy Warhol now) I'm rather abashed to discover that The 'Fro of Art is nowhere to be found on real adult PBN kits.

There is a Bob Ross PBN kit now, though. Titled Bob Ross By The Numbers, it's copyrighted in 2018 by Running Press, and it's a rather remarkable, somewhat gently iconoclastic work, not unlike Bob himself. Here is the box, on my desk, with a number of desk-top sized objects in shot to give you an idea:

The box could maybe hold a number of playing cards. And you know, going in, that you're going to have a kind of a Bob Ross experience. 

What comes out when you open this little box? Glad you asked! Here's what comes out:

1. Three small PBN panels, each about the size of a Post-it Note.
2. Seven small pots of acrylic paint
3. A totes adorbs easel for display of finished work (just one though)
4. A very tiny book about Bob Ross describing each one of the works and the thumbnailiest of histories of wet-in-wet painting and Bob's professional trajectory, which includes tips on how to mix the colors provided.
5. A very small, about 4-inch long, brush
6. A graphic instructional sheet detailing how to paint the panels

The instructional guide (shown below) tells you one thing about this kit that provides the most Rossian part of th experience: You'll be using whatever skills you have in paint mixing to create the proper colors to apply to each panel. This is all about process!

There are three panels: The one I've pictured, with the iconic picture of Bob and his 2 inch brush; a Scenic Landscape, and a Covered Bridge, each one drawn from Bob's colossal oeurve, with a picture of the original painting as reference. 

The small book accompanying the set has a bit of commentary on each piece and tries to borrow Bob's easygoing style to describe and inspire. One omission, and a rather curious one at that, is that the text says that the 'canvases' (their word) has numbered sections, but as you can see in the photo next:

There are no numbers on the panel. Fortunately the instructional guide is clearly marked, and if I wanted to, I'd take, maybe, a pencil and mark down the numbers before starting. They aren't that complex, so I don't know if I'll take the time to do that. 

It's an audacious little design though, this is a thing that can fit in the pocket (well, of a pair of cargo pants, but still) and it looks like it'll be a bit of fun if I don't take it too seriously. This is Bob Ross for fun, not necessarily for artistic accomplishment, though PBN can get you going in directions, as I myself have found. 

And for all this, it doesn't seem to promise more than it'll deliver. Bob has taught us to take things as we find, them, really, 

[art] Bob Ross's 70th Birthday Gift ...

2882.... is the sweetest Google doodle I've ever seen. Seriously.

 I mean, I saw the little squirrel on his shoulder and I kind of want to cry now.

[art] If Shepherd Fairey Had Met Bob Ross …

2780.Maybe agitprop history might have been a bit different:

Inspired by Shepherd Fairey's OBEY GIANT;
Image of Bob Ross rendered from BRI Logo (via BRI):
above image intended as homage only and is
not for sale.

[teh_funnay] Bob Ross: The Way Of The Artist

2753.Is he in the Rosswalk?

Then give him a pass.