Just a handful of recurring elements define Bob Ross’ calming and instructive landscape paintings, and FiveThirtyEight has gone through every single one that he made on The Joy of Painting to find out exactly what subjects interested him the most. While lakes and mountains are up there, FiveThirtyEight found that Ross’ happy trees are the element that turn up in most often in his paintings — 85 percent of them featured at least two. Beyond breakdown by individual elements, you can head over to FiveThirtyEight to see exactly how Ross liked to pair these elements too: for instance, if Ross painted a mountain, 66 percent of the time he put snow on it.
The joy of statistically analyzing Bob Ross’ happy little trees
is The Verge’s executive editor. He has covered tech, policy, and online creators for over a decade.
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