As someone who was alive when Bob Ross (and William Alexander before him — that’s where the approach is from) was on PBS, I can 100% testify that you can paint along with him.
You may need to learn how to set up your paints and such… but this is what people did, live, while the show aired. That’s what the show was for. I had family members create lovely works of art they enjoyed, which I still have on my walls, because William Alexander and Bob Ross both said:
SCREW METICULOUS CLASSICAL ART PRACTICES — JUST GRAB A PALETTE KNIFE AND BIG OLD BRUSH AND PAINT!
They freed a whole generation of people who were taught to paint detail and realism and exact representation of reality — people who largely gave up this kind of thing because it got tedious.
I watched the joy of family members as they rediscovered art as a messy fun spontaneous half hour activity.
i can answer that! cough. i'm one kennedy mclune (just a pen name), an extremely capricious but disjointedly prolific artist + writer. this'll be the blog for original works of mine. seeing as no one knows those (fair enough!), i'll use this pinned post as a master-index for them, if anyone's curiosity is piqued:
(*all the following stories take place in a universe where the main characters are technically light beams and most people have colour names as a result. less weird in action than it sounds i promise. collectively they're referred to as "The Magnicanon". i would also say most of them aren't directed at a young audience at all, but i won't write anything really explicit here or anything. stories listed in their "intended reading order", but not necessarily chronologically)
1. The Loneliness Motif
rigel anthelion, a "boring" and uncreative 17-year-old who lives in the shadow of his younger sister celeste, has a newfound passion for creative writing ignited by his patient and compassionate creative writing teacher, miss vanilla "annie" duchenne. their relationship slowly gets more twisted and codependent as she pushes him to get better and better at writing, to the point where one has to wonder if it's just a cover for something else. intentionally pretty messed up!
this one's on the backburner but figured i might as well include it in the case i return to it someday. 18k script i did in 2023 just waiting to be rewritten lord help me
2. Luna Sloth
semi-episodic goofy shenanigans about characters emeralde "emmy" mordente, the storyline's namesake and 6ft-something-tall schlubby/off-kilter lesbian with luna moth wings,
her best friend indigo "indie" mondegreen- seemingly average guy with a tendency to blend into the background (despite wearing a signature green scarf everywhere), and a college history student who makes music with emmy,
indie's classmate iris abney- an impeccably-dressed goth girl with eyesight so good it's distressing, keeps to herself but fancies herself as possibly the single most unique person on the planet,
and aquamarina "mary" moreton, a thrill-seeking twiggy menace, master impressionist and serial dater with perpetual eyebags. by the time she runs into emmy + indie, she's desperately trying to escape her past as a former corny sitcom actor 6 years ago...
not mentioned but also very-real points of note are emmy's eccentric rich family (includes her grumpy dentist dad and workaholic older sister), what i can only describe as an emmy -> iris -> indie Crush Conga Line, and the specific details of mary's backstory. i probably make the most doodles for this one by far so be on the lookout!!
3. The Murder of Teal Taylor
i'm being so real this story is barely formed rn. but basically, the main character (cerulean tyndall) is a cynical (extremely british) 30ish-year-old man with memory problems, and a wild past he tried to step away from, preferring to take up a humble life as a... bike... fixer? he gets caught up in the murder case of teal taylor, a journalist, and has so little faith in his ability to be a good person, he assumes he must have done it and forgot everything. but surely there's no way...
he has to talk to the other 4 suspects, all people with drastically different relations to the victim, and find the truth of the matter himself, constantly fighting his instinct to stick his head in the sand and take the easier route (instead of the right one).
AGAIN this one is so underbaked so be aware. the characters have designs and there's the vaguest hint of a plot but that's it. takes place roughly 20 years before the rest of the stories
4. After Effects
excessively methodical fuckass-bob-wearing teenage girl, vermillia "millie" spherichrome, hears via her dad (and his government job) that the mayor of another city (violet abney) is part of a conspiracy to extract precious resources (like glass) from the environment. in way over her head, she persuades him to let her move from mellamnis (which is like the usa but with more honey) to aquaria's capital city glacington (which is like if new york was in england (and was also blue)) with her auntie, accidentally going through a near-death experience in the process.
she wakes up in the house of lazuli "lazzy" tyndall, a cheery (but weirdly mysterious) kid about millie's age or older, and finds out that the physical trauma of what happened gave her chromatic aberration- effectively, this gives her a deadly "glass allergy", which as you can see from above is a big problem. she begrudgingly has to accept lazzy's help in her quest to learn more about mayor abney. emmy is also here for some reason. it's about 2 years after luna sloth so she has longer hair but is otherwise the exact same. her laidback nature has her work as a foil to ambitious-high-strung millie
i probably draw the 2nd most for this one!
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anyway HAHA YAY that should be everything!! so excited to actually post eventually!! time to hit it big and get maybe like 5 notes per post perhaps
some of the best writing advice I’ve ever received: always put the punch line at the end of the sentence.
it doesn’t have to be a “punch line” as in the end of a joke. It could be the part that punches you in the gut. The most exciting, juicy, shocking info goes at the end of the sentence. Two different examples that show the difference it makes:
doing it wrong:
She saw her brother’s dead body when she caught the smell of something rotting, thought it was coming from the fridge, and followed it into the kitchen.
doing it right:
Catching the smell of something rotten wafting from the kitchen—probably from the fridge, she thought—she followed the smell into the kitchen, and saw her brother’s dead body.
Periods are where you stop to process the sentence. Put the dead body at the start of the sentence and by the time you reach the end of the sentence, you’ve piled a whole kitchen and a weird fridge smell on top of it, and THEN you have to process the body, and it’s buried so much it barely has an impact. Put the dead body at the end, and it’s like an emotional exclamation point. Everything’s normal and then BAM, her brother’s dead.
This rule doesn’t just apply to sentences: structuring lists or paragraphs like this, by putting the important info at the end, increases their punch too. It’s why in tropes like Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking or Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick, the odd item out comes at the end of the list.
Subverting this rule can also be used to manipulate reader’s emotional reactions or tell them how shocking they SHOULD find a piece of information in the context of a story. For example, a more conventional sentence that follows this rule:
She opened the pantry door, looking for a jar of grape jelly, but the view of the shelves was blocked by a ghost.
Oh! There’s a ghost! That’s shocking! Probably the character in our sentence doesn’t even care about the jelly anymore because the spirit of a dead person has suddenly appeared inside her pantry, and that’s obviously a much higher priority. But, subvert the rule:
She opened the pantry door, found a ghost blocking her view of the shelves, and couldn’t see past it to where the grape jelly was supposed to be.
Because the ghost is in the middle of the sentence, it’s presented like it’s a mere shelf-blocking pest, and thus less important than the REAL goal of this sentence: the grape jelly. The ghost is diminished, and now you get the impression that the character is probably not too surprised by ghosts in her pantry. Maybe it lives there. Maybe she sees a dozen ghosts a day. In any case, it’s not a big deal. Even though both sentences convey the exact same information, they set up the reader to regard the presence of ghosts very differently in this story.
Does anyone have the fucking tiktok video of the overly enthusiastic rich bearded guy showing off his new hiking shoes in his Mansion and the Woods, but then another dude duets with it to make it look like he's escaping from being held prisoner please please
Hey The Stanley Parable fans, I hope you find this dream summary amusing.
So a few nights ago I had a dream that Stanley had somehow died in the parable but the Narrator didn't notice so the devs where scrambling to replace him like a goldfish before the narrator found out. I got chosen as the replacement Stanley and the Narrator didn't notice a thing. Funny thing is I had pointed out that I look nothing like Stanley (short, black, and a teenager), so the Narrator would definitely notice. The devs just told me in response that, "That dude is so old a forgetful he hasn’t noticed that we've replaced Stanley 100 times already, he won't notice now."
