This article was inspired by the work of two artists in particular: Bob Ross is the first. Click on the image to buy a copy of the Bob Ross 2021 Calendar, featuring twelve of Bob’s paintings (not including the one on the cover) from Amazon for (currently) US$14.99 (I get a small commission).

There have been three shows that seriously went into oil painting on Australian TV. The first was the Rolf Harris Show, in which Rolf used house-paints on a large board, paining in just two or three pigments; his art was often comprised of abstract shapes until the whole image came together in a fairly impressionistic way. But that one was a long time ago, and Harris’ conviction on molestation charges some years back have left his name and reputation thoroughly mired, so let’s forget that one.

The second one was a show on public broadcasting, back when that was widely available in Australia (before the government tried to pull the plug – it survived, but only in one Australian city, and it’s not mine). This was Masterclass In Oils With Ken Harris (no relation to Rolf so far as I am aware). This show was so popular that Ken was even nominated for the Australian equivalent of an Oscar, a Logie, in the year before Public Broadcasting went away for the majority of Australians. While some of the shows that I watched regularly have migrated to commercial TV, and some to Australian Cable TV, Masterclass In Oils (so far as I know) isn’t one of them.

Masterclass In Oils with Ken Harris, represented here by a modified image from the Facebook page, is available as DVDs (A$15) or direct downloads (A$10) from the Ken Harris Art School – just click on the image and look for the “online store” tab at the top (I don’t get any commission from them)..Note that DVDs are available in both PAL (Australian) and NTSC (US) Formats, just specify the format in your order (and note that, being Australian, the default is probably PAL).

The last is actually an older show that has only just made it to Australian TV in recent times, The Joy Of Painting with Bob Ross. This American show was quite popular 20 or 30 years ago, and the star is now sadly deceased. But one of our networks has picked it up and started airing it from the beginning of Season 2, one episode a weekday; they are now up to early in the sixth season.

Both Ken and Bob used quite different variations of a technique known as Wet on Wet, which basically means that the artist doesn’t have to wait for his paint to dry before he can move on to the next part of the project. Bob’s technique is (was) to use a special thinner (either “Magic White” or “Magic Black”, depending on the color of the canvas that he’s going to paint) so that oil paint will blend and spread on the canvas; Ken uses a special medium to achieve much the same end result, but in a quite distinct way. The other notable difference between them is that the largest brush Ken usually uses is about 2.5cm (1 inch) wide, while Bob uses three or four-inch house-painting brushes. The difference in their tools manifests as a difference in what they do with those tools, giving each an individual style that has both distinct and common elements with the other.

It occurred to me, the other day, that many of the principles of wet-on-wet oil painting contain lessons for RPG GMs – if taken as a metaphor and painted with an especially broad brush. Today’s article is going to take five of those principles and turn them into six such lessons.

Principle 1: You Need The Dark to be able to see the Light

That’s practically a verbatim quotation from Bob’s show. He’s referring to the need for a contrast in order for things to be clearly visible.

I actually use a lot of the wet-on-wet techniques in my digital artwork (with appropriate modifications), and this is a defining principle there, too. I actually did a series of snapshots capturing different stages of a piece of art to explain how this functions in an art sense, because that’s relevant to the RPG interpretations of this quite memorable principle.

Each of these images is larger than the display area within this post (unless I turned them all sideways, or painted them that way to start with – something to remember for next time) – to see them full-sized, just click on the image. To indicate images that can be ‘enlarged’ this way, I’ve given them a red border.

Let’s start with a background – two colors of sky, some clouds, a setting sun, some mountains, and a rough vegetation fill on black at the bottom.

The background. Note that this contains the only mistake in the process – the sun shouldn’t be at the center, it should be just inside the peak on the right. That’s because it was added as an afterthought and in great haste – and committed-to before the mistake was spotted. Originally, this background had neither sun nor mountains – one of the benefits of digital art!

I then decide where the featured tree(s) are going to be and, with a dark green, put in a generic indication of the shape formed by the leaves:

A mass of dark leaves added – it looks like a dark cloud hanging in midair.

Trees need a trunk, and some main branches. A dark brown does the job. In an oil painting, I would then add the lighter brown to give the wood some texture; in the digital world, it’s easier to work the other way around.

Adding a trunk, branches, and some suggestion of wooden texture. Note how fake the whole thing feels with the branches in front of the leaves! But there is method to this madness.

A lot of the believability of the painting as a whole will rest on the trunk making the tree seem real, so I spent quite a bit of time on it. The next step is to add a bit of reflected light to the side that’s away from the light source – except that I’ve put the light source on the wrong side of the tree by mistake. Oh, well….

Adding some reflected light to the trunk of the tree

It may have looked like the reflected light was a little heavy-handed, but the next step, adding a second, lighter color to the texture, covers up some of it, so that I end up with a four-color bark texture.

Enriching the trunk’s texture

The final step in terms of the trunk is to add some highlights on the side that was supposed to be facing the light source.

Trunk and branch highlights and some twigs here and there.

The dark shape that was already there represents the part of the tree’s foliage that is behind the trunk. Now it’s time to start adding the parts that are in front of the branches, taking care not to completely obscure everything that’s already there. As usual, I start by laying down some dark areas – this is a step that is usually skipped by those using actual paint. I’m concentrating on trying to define the shape of the groups of leaves that we can see, and I’m actually using a darker green than the background so that there will be greater contrast.

Adding dense dark foreground foliage. Note that you can still see the trunk and branches in places.

Next, I add highlights to those shapes. If I were working with actual oil paints, I would not to this until after the mid-tones were added (the next step).

Adding highlights to the foliage, giving the impression of individual leaves and defining the shape of the foliage.

Adding mid-tones over the top of the highlights gives the impression that the highlights are smaller shapes than the eye can make out, creating greater realism.

“Defining and restricting” the highlights with mid-tones creates the impression of smaller shapes within the larger one. With the actual “wet-on-wet” technique of Bob Harris, he mixes colors in his brush, loading it up with different colors of paint, so that he can do both this step and the previous one in a single operation.

I was starting to run out of time at this point, so I started taking a little less care than I had been doing to this point. Right now, the tree is ‘floating’ in front of the background; the next step is to correct that by putting some grass or bushes in front of the roots. This is done in exactly the same way as the foliage of the tree, and often uses similar or identical colors. So we start by adding a dark green background shape:

A dark base starts the process of anchoring the tree to the landscape.

At this point, I hadn’t decided whether or not to do bushes or grass, but now it was time to make that decision. I went for bushes, and added highlights appropriately. Notice again that with a digital painting, the idea is to put on too much highlight and then restrict it, whereas in an oil painting, you can add highlights and mid-tones at the same time.

The other thing that starts happening as a result is that the shape of the land begins to be defined – there’s clearly some sort of gully to the right of the tree.

If I were doing this painting “for real” (either with oils or digitally), I would have actually done the entire foreground, and not just the bit where the tree happened to be. I would also have left a patch on the left for a stream, providing a source for the reflected light. But since it wasn’t germane to the actual subject to be discussed, and I was short of time, none of that got done.

Bush highlights defining the shape of the brush at the base of the tree and the lay of the land. I was sloppy doing this due to a shortage of time, and would not be happy with the results in real life. I’ve covered too much of the dark.

As before, I then “restrict” the highlights with a mid-tone over the top. I’ve also changed my mind at this point and gone with grass instead of bushes – which only shows how effective this technique is, because you can’t tell that this wasn’t always what I intended to do.

Mid-tones define the shape of the highlights.

The final step is to add some more of the texture and color of the foreground over the top to blend the addition into the overall landscape.

A blending with the foreground completes the illusion of the tree’s base being part of the landscape.

Here’s a larger closeup of the tree – complete with the mistake of the “sun” being on the wrong side of the tree, and the wrong side for the mountain highlights, for that matter. Oops.

A closeup of the focal point of the painting. Because you can see a lot less of the parts of the painting that weren’t “developed” or “worked up”, it actually feels more realistic than the larger image.

Now, to the point: having led you through the process, I then took advantage of the fact that I was working digitally, and had put each of these steps into a separate layer of my image – I went through each of the dark layers and simply lightened them to a 50% value. Yes, the result doesn’t look real – it looks overexposed – but that’s not the point; the point is this: how much of the detail of the shapes and textures can you see?

Without the dark, you can’t see the light. Mid-tones alone are not enough to convey solidity and detail.

To conclude the exercise, I then applied an “automatic contrast” function within the painting application I was using (Krita, available free from krita.org (and no, I don’t get a commission on free products, either)):

Restoring part of the contrast was an interesting exercise. The mountains feel just as solid as they did before, but the tree doesn’t. You can see the overall shape of the foliage, but the detail is still mostly lost; greater contrast is needed.

Without the dark, you can’t see the light.

RPG Interpretation: Lesson #1

There are two useful lessons from this principal for RPG GMs. The first deals in characterization. Positive traits stand out more if they have darker traits with which to contrast. A single negative trait that impacts substantial areas of an NPC’s life is enough.

Example: A beggar who is homeless, dirty, unkempt, greedy, foul-mouthed, prone to violence, and no respecter of people or authority. Sounds like a pretty disagreeable sort, doesn’t he? But if he was an ex-soldier who intervened to prevent someone getting hurt or killed by a couple of thugs, or did something else heroic – rescuing people trapped in a burning building, perhaps – how much more noteworthy does the deed seem? Especially if one of the people rescued had turned the beggar away or mistreated him in some way a short time earlier?

Even if the overwhelming balance of the character is to be positive, you still need a darker thread that the character keeps under tight control, or maybe doesn’t even realize is there, to have a rich characterization.

Example: A used car salesman who has a lovely wife, 2.5 children (number three is due in 3 months), pays his taxes, treats his wife and kids well, works hard trying to satisfy his customers and get them the best deal that he possibly can. But he has a dark secret that he’s hiding, and the need to live it down is what continually drives him to be as close to the perfect man as he can manage. Perhaps his dark secret isn’t even a crime for which others would hold him responsible – guilt over an argument with his first wife just before she was killed in an auto accident, for example – so long as HE feels responsible for what happened. Note how this small stain on his history grounds the character in realism and makes him feel far more clearly defined.

The converse is also true – a villain who used to be a good guy, or who has a streak of good somewhere in him, both seems more realistic and at the same time, more villainous. Of course, such traits need to make sense within context – “Kittens? I love Kittens!” just doesn’t work (except maybe in a comedic sense). But a villain who makes sure that retirement homes and the elderly in general aren’t directly harmed by him because they remind him of his mother, the only person who (he feels) ever truly gave him unconditional love, works.

The maniac serial killer who is an expert on gastronomy, or a wine collector, works – see Silence Of The Lambs and consider Hannibal Lector without the “Faber beans and a nice Chianti” reference; how much nicer and tamer does he seem without these redeeming qualities?

And this principle applies ten-fold, one-hundred-fold, to mega-cosmic arch-villains. It’s popular to treat these as Forces Of Nature – and that’s one of the major mistakes that was made with the second Fantastic Four movie. They tried to treat Galactus as both a villain and a force of nature, with absolutely no humanity, and absolutely no justification for what he did.

So he eats planets? In the comics, he had a sense of mercy – sparing Norinn Radd and transforming him into the Silver Surfer to function as his herald, that he might give the population of a planet to be consumed the chance to flee, or make peace with whatever gods they worship. But none of that was part of the characterization of the Surfer in the movie, and they had removed the human-like personification of Galactus (too difficult, too expensive, or ‘too superhero’?) and this left the villain a hollow shell who couldn’t carry the film.

One of the biggest villains in my superhero campaign is a character named Torquemada, who transformed into a cosmic threat because he goes from world to world judging their morality against his “perfect standards” and executing any populace that don’t measure up to save future generations from being condemned to the fires of Hell. An ultra-pious uber-zealot – but he considers what he is doing to be an act of mercy, even kindness, and that is what makes his actions all the more villainous from an outside perspective.

Without the dark, you can’t see the light. Without the light, you can’t really see the dark.

RPG Interpretation: Lesson #2

The other RPG application of this principle can also be expressed by associating it with another popular aphorism: “It’s always darkest before the dawn”.

The sense of achievement in a victory is proportional to the desperateness of the situation just before the big comeback. If the PCs win easily, the victory seems flat or hollow, not an achievement of substance. This is the whole point of the articles that I have written on the emotional intensity – the emotional response of the players will derive from their sense of achievement, and that derives from the difficulties that they have had to overcome along the way.

Principle 2: Work from the back to the front to create depth

There has been just enough of this in the painting example offered above that it serves as an example of this principle.

The objective, in terms of painting, can be summed up as “the more layers you can create in an image, the greater the depth that is conveyed by one being in front of another.”

RPG Interpretation: Lesson #3

There is a fairly obvious literary analogue to this situation – the more layers to a plot, the richer and more complex that plot, provided that all the layers receive equal attention, are equally creative and compelling, etc.

But a literary work – like a painting – is something that you can take as long over as you have time. If it takes you three weeks to write a page, it takes you three weeks. The process is complete when the last word is written and not before. Many authors will rewrite scenes and even whole chapters once they have reached the end and know what they need to foreshadow, and what needs to be jettisoned because it’s unresolved.

Things are a little different when it comes to an RPG. It’s bang easy to create additional layers of plot – every encounter can add one, sometimes even two or three, no problem. The difficulties are two-fold: You have to be able to manage those ongoing plot threads, which includes keeping track of them, keeping them progressing, keeping them bubbling away in the background, and having them build to a climax at a time when you need such a climax; and, your players have to be able to keep track of all the disparate plot threads.

It follows that every campaign will be different in the depth that can be attained and delivered. Most of my players are capable of really complicated situations with dozens of plotlines festering away in the background; but one is less capable of that, and needs a more straightforward situation. I can satisfy both by keeping the “foreground elements” few and straightforward, whenever one of those background elements comes to the fore. Another way of looking at it is that I have one player who prefers (and is better at) dealing with the immediate situation in front of them, while the others maintain connection to all the surrounding context for him.

When working on an adventure, I always start with the background, and the plotlines that are running there. Initial events from the ‘feature’ plot will always – and should always – be assessed in terms of that background, which provides context and meaning to the events, and motivation to respond to those events. That response may or may not be entirely predictable, but most GMs can usually come fairly close with their assessments – enough so that they can continue game prep on the basis of a few assumptions. That means that you can plan for the most likely responses by the players, and how various game entities will react to the player character’s response.

You thus get a straightforward ‘rolling development’ – background, event, response, background – with a straightforward plot that ties it to the game world and campaign state.

Things get more complicated when a second plotline is introduced. If you can keep the two plotlines entirely distinct, it’s not all that hard to manage, but it’s generally a lot more fun to have the two interact and interplay with each other. The rolling development becomes “Background, Event (a), Response, Event (b), Response, Background” – in which all the ‘a’ events from one plot thread and all the ‘b’ events form another. It may be that at times there IS not ‘a’ event until after a further development of the ‘b’ plot.

And, of course, you can add more plotlines and layers as you see fit. It’s not abnormal in my campaigns for each PC to have one or two plot threads of their own as well as one or more all-of-group plotlines running. The fun comes when one of these has an impact on another of the plot threads, or when one plotline causes a PC to do something that complicates another. It’s also human nature: when people associate with each other on a regular basis, one persons’ plotline spills over into the life of another PC, sometimes unpredictably.

Which brings me back to the interpretation of the artistic principle of painting: Many layers create depth, and the best approach to creating many layers (the ONLY way, with oil paints) is to work from the background (where things are vague and blurry) to the foreground, where things are close to the ‘viewer’ and relatively sharp.

Of course, I could now complicate the whole picture by bringing up photography, and paintings that are designed to look like photographs, in which there is a “focal plane” where things are sharp, and anything significantly closer to the viewer is just as blurred as the background if not more-so.

Yet, this also works as an analogy for the game narrative shifting from one plotline – one ‘focal plane’ – to another, because the other planes are still there as influences – they are simply out-of-focus and not the center of attention at the time.

Principle 3: Staying Flexible Permits Blending

Flexibility, in the case of painting, comes from the use of a medium, either mixed into the paint (the Ken Harris approach) or applied to the surface of the painting (Bob Harris’ technique).

They are both about blending one color with another.

To frame this discussion, I put together another quick painting, this time to illustrate the process by which I created the sky in the earlier examples.

The process of creating a sunset sky involves six steps, described in the text below.

• Step one was to select the colors – a darker blue, a red, a slightly orange yellow, a brighter yellow, and (underlying them all), white.
• Step two was to blend these both downwards and upwards with the white underneath, then to blend them with each other. This is easy to do with an airbrush in digital painting, and not much more difficult to do with a clean, dry, brush in the wet-on-wet style – the medium means that the colors blend easily.
• Step three was to splotch in many variations and tones of blue and white to roughly form clouds. In this case, there’s a medium-dark blue, with a dark blue band towards the bottom of it, a lighter blue above it, a gray above that, and a white on top the gray and penetrating down into the light blue. These are in a pattern of rough shapes that will become cloud formations.
• Step four was to blend and swirl these colors to form the cloud banks. Note that if I wanted these clouds to be non-threatening, I would have put the lighter colors toward the bottom (the light source) and not the top – this gets interpreted by the viewer as very hostile, dark, clouds.
• The first four steps are more or less the same as those on the painting shows (they might only use one or two colors, but that’s the only distinction). Step 5 is something of my own design: I tap on some highlights to the cloud formations in white…
• …and then, in step 6, I more gently blend and streak these, sometimes in a completely different (by 90 degrees) direction to those of the underlying ‘cloud’ from step four, giving additional structure and texture.

  Perhaps not strictly necessary, but I think that it enhances the result.

RPG Interpretation: Lesson #4

When it comes to an RPG, you are blending plotlines. I alluded to this in the previous section; plotlines are at their most interesting (and unpredictable) when they start to interact with each other. Some of this, you can learn to do by design; some of it will be a happy accident; and some of it will happen because your players have PCs who know each other.

Interactions can be additive (players putting two and two together to get 22), divisive (one player blaming another for something the other player’s PC did), subtractive (deciding that whatever they are dealing with is intended as a distraction to keep them from interfering with something else that’s going on – and some of the time, they may be right about that), or multiplicative (where one problem compounds with another to make a far more serious problem that the NPC responsible didn’t anticipate – not that they necessarily care, one way or another).

They can be affirmative (the solution to one unlocking a solution to another), progressive (removing a roadblock that has been preventing a solution being found to problem #2), or complicating (making it harder to solve problem #2).

Some people write because they find the characters they have created to be compelling and want/need to find out what happens to them next. Such people are naturals to become RPG players and GMs, they just may not know it, yet.

The unpredictability means that while the GM may be better-informed than the players, and hence be able to make better-informed guesses, he doesn’t know what will happen any more than the players do. Part of that uncertainty, that mystery, stems from the interaction between plotlines, and it can easily force the GM into off-the-cuff ad-hoc play. I can suggest a course of action through an NPC – effectively, leading the PCs to a particular body of water – but I can’t make them drink it. At best, I can try and make them thirsty…

The more flexible the GM, the better he will be at integrating multiple plotlines into a seamless whole.

Principle 4: Layers Give Depth

Seems to me that I’ve mentioned this one already, but my notes suggest that I had something else in mind as an RPG-related meaning.

RPG Interpretation: Lesson #5

Plans, especially plans by villains and enemies. Very few such will simply try and bull their way straight through to a target; the smarter and more complex their plans will be.

There’s a lot of guff out there about a complex plan being more likely to break down, or being more easily thwarted. Don’t believe it – if it’s done properly, that is definitely NOT the case.

So, what does “doing it properly” consist of?

Blocking possible avenues of interference. Being prepared with a back-up plan should any of those blocks be overcome. Ensuring that anyone who might possibly oppose you is identified and has no idea of what you are really after. Having a bulletproof plan for how you will get whatever that is while appearing to go after something equally plausible.

In other words, every complication has a specific purpose, and can be abandoned or ignored should that purpose not become necessary.

In an article on running intelligent villains, I suggested that immediately the PCs decide to do something, you should ask yourself a simple set of questions (using die rolls if necessary):

• Would the Bad Guy have anticipated that possibility?
• If yes, what has he done to prepare to thwart it?
• If not, can he adapt preparations for any other possibility that he may have anticipated?
• If not, has he anticipated being surprised? Does he have a back-up plan?
• If not, has he anticipated possibly being captured? What preparations or plans has he put in place to get him out – or to run his operations from the inside?

You don’t have to be as smart as the villain – you simply have to simulate being that smart. But the more of these questions that you can answer in advance, and have the PCs notice the preparations accordingly, the smarter the villain appears.

What are the top five groups likely to interfere in a villain’s plot in your campaign? It might be an Order of Paladins, a Circle of Mages, a greedy or weak underling, a Divine Busybody, or a Political Authority. In a different campaign, it might be This group of superheros or That group, or Interpol, or the FBI, or a rival villain after the same target.

If you can identify them, you can come up with a plan to have them distracted or tied in knots at the critical time – which leaves it all up to the wild cards, the x-factor – the PCs.

Or perhaps the PCs are one of those identified potential troublemakers, and they have to overcome the villain’s distractions/countermeasures before they can even identify who is after them and why, and begin to tackle the main plot.

Principle 5: Professional Pigments are fine for most purposes, but there’s always something that you’ll want to custom-build

In the case of both painters that I’ve derived most of my inspiration for this article from, the something has been the medium, and sometimes, the canvas. In the case of many painters from the old school, they will want to prepare some or all of their own pigments. In the case of Bob Ross, he had built a custom easel out of a stepladder because he wanted to hold his canvasses more rigidly.

In some cases, artists like to outline a painting in pencil before starting; others are more avant-garde in their approach. Ross was somewhere in between – according to Wikipedia, he always painted each picture three times – once as an off-camera guide for him to follow, once on-camera, and a third, more detailed version painted after the show was recorded for inclusion in one of his instructional books. The versions were generally marked on the side or back of the canvas – “Kowalski” for the off-camera version, “TV” for the on-TV production, and “Book” for the later version.

“Kowalski” refers to Annette and Walt Kowalski, who assisted Ross in creating his art supplies business. When he died, ownership of the business passed on to the Kowalskis.

RPG Interpretation: Lesson #6

It’s true for RPGs, too. You can buy as many modules, adventures, and game supplements from the pros as you like – bringing them to life will almost inevitably involve some creative effort of your own.

Me, I’m from the much older school that says it’s preferable to create almost everything yourself – with exceptions made for the things that you simply don’t have the time or expertise to do.

Trust me, if I had the time and ability, I would sculpt miniatures for the PCs and important NPCs exactly matching their images and proportions, 3D print them, and paint them. Every battlemap would be custom-built. Every scene would be illustrated, not just described. And every adventure would be carefully hand-crafted to fit the players and their characters.

Compromise is the art of the necessary. I use commercial images that represent the PCs well enough, I guess, and a combination of HeroClix, other pre-painted Miniatures, and Cardboard Heroes for the villains. I use commercial battle-maps or sketched layouts, and often have to get creative. Descriptions get compromised to fit what I can find in photographs/illustrations online or layouts that I can put together with the battle-maps that I have available. And every now and then, when one fits, I adapt material from a commercial source – but everything is extensively rewritten to fit the campaign, and 99% of the adventures are completely original.

Because that’s what I can do with my skills and available time. On rare occasions I might turn out an original artwork as an illustration – most often diagrams, such as the ones used last week to accompany the article on the Physics of Magic in my superhero campaign.

The more that you can do yourself, the shorter the line between your creativity and the game.

Even if you are running a commercially-sourced adventure, or other game product, it’s up to you to integrate it into your game world, so there will always be something that you need to, or want to, or should modify to fit.

Don’t waste your time and effort in fighting it – learn how to do what you have to. That’s what these painting lessons on TV are all about – education in technique. That’s what Campaign Mastery is about, too – it’s right there in our mission statement: “Expert advice on creating and running exceptional campaigns”.

And that’s what this article has been all about, too.