How to Oil Paint a Landscape With Bob Ross

Everything here depends on starting wet. Cover the whole canvas with a thin, even coat of Liquid White before you begin. It leaves the surface slick, and that slickness is what lets you blend one colour into another directly on the canvas.

Then load a two-inch brush with Alizarin Crimson. Tap the bristles into the paint and work it in firmly so the colour sits all the way through, not just on the tips.

Take the loaded brush to the upper canvas and work in small crisscross strokes, little Xs, dropping a soft pink band across the sky.

Keep it loose. Nothing here needs to be placed precisely, and a two-inch brush covers ground fast enough that the whole warm underlayer takes well under a minute.

Without cleaning the brush, go straight into Phthalo Blue. Tap a little into the bristles and lay it across the top of the sky with the same crisscross strokes.

Then clean the brush and blend the two together where they meet. Move gently. The blue is many times stronger than the pink and will eat it entirely if you overwork the join.

Still water is always level, so every stroke here runs horizontally. Pull from the outside edge in toward the centre, then repeat from the other side.

Darken the corners with a little Prussian Blue, a touch in each one, top and bottom. That darkening at the edges is what pushes the centre of the painting forward.

Mix a light blue, mostly Phthalo with plenty of Titanium White. Take the corner of the brush and pull straight down in short strokes to suggest a treeline far back in the distance.

Keep the bottoms light. Tap another dry brush along the base and lift upward, and the trees appear to sit in mist.

Mix a dark from black, Prussian Blue, Phthalo Blue, a little Crimson and a touch of Sap Green. Load a fan brush on both sides.

These trees sit closer to the viewer, so they carry more detail and harder edges than the misty line behind them. Hold the brush at the top and let the bristles splay as you tap downward.

Reflections are the part traditional painters find hardest and the wet-on-wet method makes trivial. Take the same dark colour on a two-inch brush, touch the water directly below each tree, and pull straight down.

Straight down matters more than anything else here. Then drag a clean dry brush very lightly across horizontally, and the streaks become reflections.

Lay a waterline in with Liquid White pulled out flat, cutting straight across. Then highlight the evergreens with Cadmium Yellow and Yellow Ochre worked into the green already on the fan brush.

Thin the colour with a little Liquid White and pop in bushes around the base of the trees. Finish with a strip of soil mixed from white and Dark Sienna, because an island needs something for all of it to sit on.

This is the bravery test. Take the corner of the two-inch brush and block in the basic shape of a large tree at the edge of the canvas, much closer to the viewer than anything else in the scene.

Get the silhouette right and nothing else matters yet. Tap in the bushy masses, then come back with Sap Green and yellow on the corner of the brush to drop leaves over the dark shape.

Cut a path in with a light brown so there is a way to walk down to the water, then graze a white and Dark Sienna highlight along one edge, barely touching.

Work the foreground bushes with a one-inch brush loaded straight down and pulled in one direction, rounded edge upward, using almost no pressure. Add a few red flowers, a bare stick of a dead tree, and stop.