Marching Military-Style Across the Screen with a Huge Paint Brush, It's Bob Ross

He’s one of the most unfamously-famous people to ever paint a canvas in front of a camera, producing a completely finished landscape painting every single episode. Yet ‘real’ painters dislike him because of his fool-proof technique; even his own teacher disowned the ex-military Drill Instructor after Bob’s success outshone his own.

No Mistakes, Just Happy Accidents

Picture a bushy afro on top of a tall caucasian man who can literally do no wrong. Add double denim, trucker moustache, black background and eye-contact.

Write the ‘The Joy of Painting’ onto the screen and stick one large easel with glistening oil-slicked canvas to the right of said smiling denim-clad man.

Cue the flute music introduction.

It’s just you and Bob and his very big palette dotted with blobs of wet colour. He’s going to pick up that brush and ‘beat the devil out of it’ while you watch every second of a magical vista slide out of his assortment of various sized brushes. He’s probably going to talk about his love of nature and ‘critters’ too.

A love which inspires his art because it's art that flows directly from his heart.

He'll show us love makes great art. He'll show us that it motivates us to spend time and attention. You'll always see the world afresh with a constantly creative outlook. But first, he’s going to tell us all something very important. 

Mistakes Can Be Time-Bomb Miracles

There are no mistakes here. Mistakes don’t happen. “There are no mistakes,” Bob says through a smile. “Only happy accidents.”

It's like in snowboarding: once you start, stopping wouldn't just be dangerous it would ruin the FUN. Once you start your art, accept that there's no stopping and turn every mistake into a chance to change your direction in the short term.

In the long term, just keep the finish line ahead of you and keep going.

Enjoy Getting it Wrong or You're Not Going to Enjoy it

Honestly, if you don’t practice finishing art with mistakes in it, how can you ever finish art without mistakes in it? Or even just less mistakes in it.

Between what happens after your initial 'vision' and your finished product is supposed to be uniquely challenging to do. If it's physically easy then it should be mentally difficult, if it's simple to do, do it again and again. If you're not making mistakes then you're not improving.

Constant Mistakes are Your STYLE Coming Through

Use your common sense here. But in order to stop making mistakes in your art, you may want to consider that those 'errors' are just how you do stuff.

Also try to lean into your artistic errors a bit and embrace them.

I used to make my pictures too colourful by accident. I couldn't get it right. They looked so sad unless they were oversaturated. I kept doing that mistake and so I just learnt to work around this weird obsession to boost the saturation too much.

That led me to look for light conditions that tended to look good when oversaturated. And that led me even further.

Summary

So yeah, if you're not making mistakes then you should be. A lot of 'mistakes' are aspects of your own style bursting through the surface like a new skin being shed.