The Joy of Painting...

Hello all,
I've been lurking for a while, looking at all the great art you all make, and decided to finally make an account to ask this question.

I have no real skill or training in drawing or painting but love Verve for the ability it gives me to experiment with things freely. I've always loved watching Bob Ross' The Joy of Painting series and decided to watch through them and paint along. However, I quickly ran into a problem in the first episode and wanted to ask for help here.

Bob Ross always uses a specific set of brushes in the course of an episode, (almighty brush, little fan brush for distant trees, scraper thing for mountains, etc.) and I tried messing with some of the brushes and settings but I couldn't figure out how to properly emulate the different brushes / techniques he uses.

So my question is for anyone who's been using the program for a while and is comfortable with the tools available. What brushes / settings / techniques have you found work best to recreate realistic brush effects?

I'm currently using a mouse because it's what I'm comfortable with, but I do have a little old Wacom tablet stored away if that's needed to produce the desired results.

Cheers!

[Taron]

Hi Mr. Flibble!
You most certainly want to dig up your tablet, because the mouse won't ever satisfy in that regard. However, ideally you have a tablet that supports not only pen pressure, but also pen tilt. That way you can get fairly naturally acting brush effects.
In my videos you might see what brushes I'm using, if you watch carefully. Soon all this will change, which is why I haven't done an actual tutorial, yet, but even now you can do the following:

Brush #2 is great for stipple effects.
Brush #9 is ideal for proper strokes and good for blending.
Brush #8 is great for pallet knife simulations (like the mountains Bob Ross was making or the little pathways he liked, or for birch trees...)
Brush #1 is really the least interesting brush, but it's good for very smooth blending, especially using average ([shift]+[ctrl]).

Well, I'm glad you've joined in and don't hold back, if you have some paintings to share!
Experiment around with all of them and you'll find some use they all serve.

The #8 Brush is probably my favorite. I highly recommend getting a tablet just for comfort and ease of use. I also manually adjust the angle of the brush a lot by pressing Shift+A and dragging the cursor. Most important though is to just spend the time and experiment. Verve can be so comfortable to paint with.

Also, I don't mean to pester you Taron, but I'm really itching to play with a new version of Verve .

[Taron]

You have no idea just how much that will scratch your itch! ...it's a whole new world already, but I gotta get to the GUI to make all of it properly accessible, you know. I'm torn, because I want to make that massive switch to C++. I still think, I'll just release a little teaser version...

massive switch to C++

Advantages ? Twice more artistic inspiration for the user ?
Seems it's yet some capable !

Come on Taron!
TEaese Please !
ITS BEEN A WHO:E YEAR!@#$%^&*

[Taron]

Oh yeah, totally forgot to go on here!