Bob Blast’s Painterly Tips

 

5/21/26 photo reference

Bob Blast’s YouTube channel recently came to my attention. Scanning through his titles, I can see that he is a painter, not a sketcher, but as I always do with painting instruction videos, I try to apply his approach to any medium I might use. That’s how I use oil painter Ian Roberts’ extremely informative videos about composition. It’s usually a little more difficult to use pencils, crayons or markers in place of paint, but I enjoy the challenge of attempting it anyway. And almost always, the exercise reconfirms that basic art and design principles apply to any medium.

In the video I viewed recently, Blast (Bob’s real last name is Burridge, but I like that he uses “Blast”) shows how he designs paintings around figures by putting the highest contrast around the area of the focal point. He also uses negative space to clarify and design shapes. Finally, he stresses the importance of showing the direction of light. His style is more abstract than I would typically use for urban sketching, but its visual appeal made me want to try it.

Using a reference photo I had snapped on a walk, I picked out some primary colors in water-soluble markers and crayons. My color choices were based on values, not the photo, and I grabbed basic hues so that I wouldn’t get distracted by trying to “match” what I saw.

Although this approach is very different from the way I usually think, I like the result. I’m especially pleased with how the dark negative space defines the left figure’s lighted side. (I would have liked the way the high-contrast negative space defines the dog’s lighted side if I hadn’t inadvertently drawn the ground shadows through its body!)

5/23/26 Statue of Lenin, Fremont

Anyway, this exercise was a lot of challenging fun. It motivates me to take more high-contrast reference photos so that I can practice this exercise again. 

Could I ever do it on location? It’s often difficult to find a high-contrast scene with ideal lighting that would make this exercise easier, but now that I’m aware of what to look for, I see more potential. Last week in Fremont, I was thinking about Blast’s tips as I sketched the statue of Lenin. Several dense trees are behind Lenin’s head. I made the tree on the left (the lit side of the statue) darker to have higher contrast against the focal point. On that overcast afternoon, I also exaggerated the contrast between light and shadow on the whole statue and made the direction of light more obvious -- something I became more aware of because of Blast’s videos.