 Well, hi there, I'm Sandy Olak and I tried something a little different for today's video. I tried painting a Bob Ross in watercolor. Well, it is Earth Day and I thought that would be a good day to do a landscape painting. So I decided to do the Bob Ross challenge, at least what I'm calling the Bob Ross challenge. I don't know if it's a thing, but I did see somebody do a Bob Ross challenge to paint a Bob Ross painting in frosting. Yes, like the frosting you put on cakes, they did that in frosting. And if they could do it in frosting, I can do it in watercolor, right? Well, I quickly discovered, I've never tried following his directions on a painting. I quickly discovered you can't actually follow pretty much anything he says when you're painting in watercolor, because Bob paints in oils and he'll tell you just paint that whole sky blue and then go in with white paint to add your clouds. And in watercolor, we paint around the white things and we reserve those whites, we leave those white spaces, which means you have to plan ahead. You have to know a little bit about how you want to do your color blending. Do you want to drop wet into wet colors, like I just dropped that purple into the green? Or do you want to have harder edges to things? There's a lot of different decisions to make in watercolor that don't even affect oil painters at all. And that is one of the things that I love about watercolor because I'm learning a ton just by playing with it. And this painting is a great example of my playtime. I just start going for it and I don't really have a great explanation for a lot of what I'm doing in this painting because I'm just I'm just putting paint down. One of the things I decided to try to challenge myself just for fun was to paint with this flat brush. I've never done a full painting with this, and I'll switch to another brush here and there for some of the details. But it was an interesting challenge to see if I could paint a little bit more with these sort of flat lines, because that reminded me of what Bob does, because he paints with flat brushes or with a knife at various times to create textures. And I thought maybe this flat brush would accomplish that for me. But one of the things that I did discover here was if I want to do more of these big paintings, I really need some big brushes. So I did, after this video, invest in some very big and very expensive brushes. You don't have to get the big expensive brushes. I generally, in all my tutorials here on YouTube, I'm using my smaller silver brushes. And when I say smaller, like now 12 feels tiny to me because I'm using big honkin brushes for fine art paintings now. But you don't need big, giant brushes and they're also very expensive. So don't follow me unless you're really interested in investing seriously in your art. But something that I did recently, which I'm going to invite you to go look at it if you're interested, I have had only one place that I tracked any of my painting, my progress over these last five years, which was throwing all of my paintings into a cabinet in my studio. And they're inside a bag in the cabinet so nothing gets dusty. But like it's just a pile of paintings. And every once in a while, I go through it and I pull out a painting or two to frame and to put in my church because we do a show at my church. And it's an excuse to make myself frame things. So I don't have just a stack of paintings in a drawer, but that's the only time I look at them. So I have no overall sense of where I've come from and where I've gone to. And what I decided to do was to take nice pictures of everything. Nice, you know, clear, sharp ones and get the color adjustment right and everything. And then I posted them all on a page on my blog. So I can look at these and as I add more paintings to them, I can look and see, OK, this one looks a lot like that one. And and I can get an overall sense of what are the colors that I'm drawn to? What are the styles I'm drawn to? And did I do this painting and I feel good about it? Did I do that painting and feel not so good about it? And when I can see them all as small pictures on the page together, it's really interesting to start to assess a little bit of my growth and the changes that have happened in my watercolor since I first started. Now, I didn't post all the really terrible paintings on there because I do a lot of really awful paintings that just go straight into the recycle bin. And don't come haunting my house to steal things out of the recycle bin. But I do a lot of bad paintings and I have talked to lots of teachers who said, yes, they do lots of bad paintings, too. And they'll paint a second painting on the back and then they toss it in the trash and they get all the bad paintings out of them so that then they can move on to the good things. Because I mean, even this really famous teacher that I have, he literally says that out of all the paintings he does, and he paints every single day, all the paintings he does in a year, he might come out with six good ones by the end of the year. And this is a man who sells paintings for many, many, many, like thousands and thousands of dollars and stuff. So he sells paint. I asked him about this recently. Like, do you sell the ones that are like the ones you consider not good? And he actually does. So he's got a show coming up in Moscow that he has to paint things for. And I was like, well, wow, that's like some pressure. To have these spectacular paintings for this big show. And he's like, you know, I'll do my best. I'll give him what I've got at the time. And then there you go. And I've thought, you know, I only like to show things when I'm proud of what that thing is. So it's really just an interesting mental place to think at what level I would have to be at before I frame or not frame something or put it in a show or not put it in show. And I'm only at the point where I'm thinking about that. I'm not entering shows at this point. I will probably eventually, but it's just been interesting to post all that stuff together. So if you have a blog or if you have a Flickr account or something, just post all your paintings there so you can watch your progress. And if you get to the point where some of your early ones are really trashy, then go delete those if you want, or at least put them in an archive folder or something, but keep track of your progress and see how you improve over time. Because the more you paint, the better you'll get. And if you can look at your body of work all at once, then there might be a style that will start to come forth. I haven't seen like a real style that's me come forth yet. Aside from, I seem to like to spray a lot. So I like drippy things. So I have a feeling that will be a big part of it. I don't think I'm going to do my hyper realism as part of my watercolor style, even though I can do that. I can do a lot of different styles because I've studied a lot under different people. But I'm trying to figure out what is expressive of me and the kinds of things that I like to paint, the kinds of things I'm good at, and what would a style be if there were such a style for me as Sandy Olnock? Not that I can't do other things, but what would be my signature style? I have that in spades and Copic markers. Like you can look at my work and know immediately that's mine. It's just not coming forth quite yet in watercolor. And I know it takes a long time, so I'm willing to put in the time and learn all of that. And occasionally I will show you a fine art piece here on YouTube. So if you're interested in watching that kind of thing, you're welcome to see those videos as well. And that is just about it for today. This painting is just about finished. I did do this one a second time, and I will have a video of that on my social media today, a little speed video of it. It wasn't as good as this one, didn't come out as good I think as this one did, but I painted it on canvas instead of on cold press paper like this one is. And painting on canvas was a whole different experience as well. And I have some things on my blog that I wrote up about the difference between painting on these different surfaces, things I learned from this painting. So this one is Bob's oil painting, the one that I painted from a little bit. I made my trees a little more natural, my colors a little more natural. He made his trees very regular, and I kind of liked mine to feel more like a natural forest. And then I jumped over and did my painting on this giant canvas. And it came out again very differently. The paint drips a lot on these. It just kind of slides off. You could actually wash it off and start all over again on a canvas covered with a watercolor ground. So anyway, that's about it for today. Happy Earth Day. I hope you can get a chance to get out and paint something or at least go to your studio and paint a beautiful scene of Mother Earth. And I will see you again in the next video. Take care. Bye-bye.