Leffler Blog Project

“111 Years of Long-Lasting Curls: The History and Rebirth of the Perm.” Estetica Magazine , 4 July 2017, www.esteticamagazine.com/eventsnews/item/18737-111-years-of-long-lasting-curls-the-history-and-rebirth-of-the-perm. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Oil Painting.” Encyclopædia Britannica , Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 29 May 2018, www.britannica.com/art/oil-painting. Emmons, Nichlas. “An Environmental Lesson From Bob Ross.” HuffPost , HuffPost, 10 Nov. 2016, www.huffpost.com/entry/an-environmental-lesson-f_b_8522408. Military.com. “Famous Veteran: Bob Ross.” Military.com , www.military.com/veteran-jobs/career-advice/military-transition/famous-veteran-bob-ross.html. Olson, Laurie Kay. “Bob Ross's Happy Little Animal Friends.” Petslady.com , 19 July 2018, petslady.com/article/bob-ross-s-happy-little-animal-friends. Ward, Alvin. “35 Happy Little Facts About Bob Ross.” Mental Floss , 29 Oct. 2018, www.mentalfloss.com/article/510332/35-happy-little-f...

Surprisingly enough, this was not my first blog-based project this year. Last semester, in my English 103 class, we all collectively ran a class blog. Every week a different group of students would be required to create a blog post about a current event or something relevant to the class. So, I have some experience working on a blog. But, it was different, and honestly more enjoyable, to write from a first-person perspective. To be frank, I don’t really understand the point of these blog-based projects. I am a geology major, so I don’t really see myself making any blogs in my future, especially with the growing popularity of social media platforms. It has become much easier, simpler, and more effective to spread a message. As time goes on, the general population responds better to short and concise messages. For example, the app Tik Tok. This app has very quickly built a great following in the span of months, and the reason behind this is that each video has a lim...

Bob Ross absolutely deserved his fame because he had so many unique characteristics. On the surface, he is just a peaceful painter. But, when you look closer you can really see all of the things that turned him into the man we watch on TV. And, without a doubt, he was one of the most skilled painters of our time. He could bring nature to life on his canvas in a matter of minutes. I think a lot of people could stand to learn a lesson from Bob Ross. We as a society have lost our appreciation of nature and peace. But, regardless of his high-stress military career, Bob Ross retained his serene nature.

I’ll be honest, I never cared for that hairdo. I first started getting perms because I needed to save money on haircuts, but having such big hair could get in the way sometimes. But, after we started selling our own merchandise, I had to keep it. It became a part of my image. A neat little fact about perms is that the name is short for ‘permanent wave’, and getting a perm is quite the effort. You can use heat or chemicals to apply your perm. It’s really the same as straightening your hair, but you have to wrap your hair up nice and tight. It was quite the pain to re-curl every couple of months, but people liked it so at least it made them happy. “111 Years of Long-Lasting Curls: The History and Rebirth of the Perm.” Estetica Magazine , 4 July 2017, www.esteticamagazine.com/eventsnews/item/18737-111-years-of-long-lasting-curls-the history-and-rebirth-of-the-perm. Ward, Alvin. “35 Happy Little Facts About Bob Ross.”  Mental Floss , 29 Oct. 2018, www.mentalfloss.com/...

If there’s one thing I always wanted everyone to know about nature, it’s that everyone sees it differently. That’s why I wanted to teach people how to paint their own happy forests and mountains. In fact, I had a lot of little furry friends. I had a habit of rescuing and rehabilitating animals, in fact I had five of them on my show, The Joy of Painting . For example, I brought Peapod the baby squirrel on and Hoot the owl. Hoot came on as a little chick and after he was all grown up. It's like I said, if we're going to have animals around, we all have to be concerned about them and take care of them. But the most important thing about nature with my show is that anyone could do whatever they wanted with it. I didn’t want to be giving a step-by-step guide, but instead suggestions. I only ever painted nature. If you have a keen eye you might have noticed that none of the buildings I painted ever had chimneys. That’s because a chimney meant there would be people living t...

One of my many best friends throughout my career was the wet-on-wet painting technique. Oil painting is essentially painting with drying oils that consist of colored pigments. See, normally you would have to wait for every layer of oil paint to dry before you could paint again, but golly if I wasn’t impatient. I didn’t want to wait so long to bring all those scenes to life, so I started using the wet-on-wet technique. That way, I could finish a painting in a short little session. But, the tricky thing about it is that wet-on-wet makes your painting a little more unpredictable. But, it didn’t bother me. We don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents. Anyway, everybody gives me so much love and credit for the wet-on-wet technique, but it really goes all the way back to the Baroque period. And there were so many skilled artists using it before me, like Claude Monet and Vincent Van Gogh. Of course, I can't only thank my paints. I also had all my different brushes to rea...

It took me twenty years, but I have finally retired from my career in the U.S. Air Force. To think that I joined the military right away when I was just 18. I remember seeing snow and mountains for the first time at the Eielson Air Force Base like it was yesterday. All that work got me to the rank of Master Sergeant. I was the guy who makes you scrub the latrine, the guy who makes you make your bed, the guy who screams at you for being late to work. The job requires you to be a mean, tough person. And I was fed up with it. I promised myself that if I ever got away from it, it wasn't going to be that way anymore. But, Alaska was so beautiful that I just couldn’t stop painting. I even developed my wet-on-wet painting technique so I could paint even faster. Gosh, I would even make a couple of paintings on my lunch breaks. Once I started selling them I realized I was making a heck of a lot more money selling paintings than I did working for the military. So I finally decided ...

This blog will be written in first-person from the perspective of Bob Ross, the famous television painter, detailing various aspects of his life and career. The goal of this blog is to give insight into the parts of Ross’s life that made him an icon. Bob Ross is best known for his calm and peaceful disposition and his oil painting skills, but a large part of his personality is his iconic afro and his love for nature. Ross left the military to pursue his hobby, filming videos of him painting scenes of nature at a studio in Muncie, Indiana. I chose Bob ross for this project because I, myself, paint and draw as a hobby and he is my favorite artist. He was a big inspiration for a lot of my artwork and he has a one-of-a-kind personality. Bob Ross is extremely humble and kind, and his monologue is always spoken in a calm and kind voice. But, sadly, Bob Ross did not gain a majority of his fame until after his death in 1995. But, this is not to say he had no following before.