Under Pastel Skies

That peach and gold glow spreading across the upper right of the sky is the whole reason this painting exists. Bob Ross built it the way he built everything, working wet oil paint into wet oil paint on a canvas already coated with a clear base, which let the colors blend right on the surface instead of on a palette. The mountain was almost certainly scraped in with a palette knife, its snowy ridges just thick paint pulled downward and left rough. The evergreens came from a fan brush, tapped down in a row that gets darker and closer as it moves toward the left edge. The distant peaks fade into haze because he simply mixed more white into the same blue, a trick that fools the eye into reading depth.

Ross made more than 400 of these on television between 1983 and 1994, each one finished in about half an hour while he talked about happy accidents and his pet squirrels. He learned the wet-on-wet method from painter Bill Alexander and spent years stationed in Alaska with the Air Force, which is where the snowy mountains and evergreen shorelines came from.