Kens Photography Blog

If you have taken a look at some of the backgrounds you can purchase you will have noticed that they are realy expensive. You can make your own studio backgrounds with painters canvas for cheap and they will be extremely durable and tough.

White is boring for portraits, so how can you make those nice blurry colors you see on professionally made backdrops?

First you go out and get some oil paint in whatever colors you like, blue, red, green is good to start with, blue especially. Also get a huge tube of white and the biggest softests brush you can find.

What’s that you say? Can’t paint to save your life? No worries. Go to youtube and type in “Bob Ross” Don’t worry you’r not going to learn how to paint Bob Ross landscapes. All you are looking for here is Bobs technique for painting the blue sky he always starts out with, it’s dead easy and anyone with a pair of hands will be able to pick it up allmost immidiately. All you do is first prepare the canvas by painting it with some white oil paint diluted with turpentine about 50/50 mix and cover the canvas with this first. Then grab a tiny bit of blue paint and do some criss cross strokes willy nilly at random places. Because there’s a background of the 50/50 white mix, when you do criss cross strokes the paint wil go all blurry and blend perfectly, it’s dead easy to don’t be scare to try it. I can’t paint for shit and I picked it up after doing a couple of practice strokes on some cardboard.

Once you get this down you can create all kinds of abstract studio backgrounds. The good thing about painters canvas is that it’s very thick and though and blocks light 100% so you can paint different colors on each side of a piece of canvas to get more miliage for your money, allthough it’s cheap. Get a large roll of the widest canvas you can find and go to town, there’s about 8 lenghts of backgrounds in a large roll, paint on both sides and it’s 16, plenty for anyone. Save any scraps of canvas left over, they make exelent reflectors to bounce some light around.

EDIT: Sadly, after Bobs death, his family is raping his corpse for all its worth (gotta make the most money before people forget about him, Bob was not like this, he was a generous wonderfull person), and has been getting all his episodes deleted of youtube, making it harder for people to follow this tutorial and make thier own studio backgrounds, I found a pretty good video showing Bobs technique. Just remember, the important part for getting your studio background all smooth is to prepare the canvas with the white/turpentine mixture first, otherwise it won’t blend properly.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CUs29vV0N4