Students created works of art inspired by artist Bob Ross Wednesday night, during a painting event hosted by the Marshall University Chi Alpha Christian group in the Memorial Student Center.

The event was planned by Balsam Ghali, a senior marketing major, and Clay Shriver, a sophomore computer science major. Both said that nothing like the event has happened at Marshall before.

“It is, you know, he’s just a dude who paints, and he turned out to be an icon,” Shriver said, after being asked about the possibility of the event being repeated next year. “I think it would be, but it gets interesting while conversing and painting at the same time.”

Though Ross is often associated with “happy trees,” they were not the only things students painted Wednesday night.

“I think a lot of people are going to make a lot of beautiful things, but I’ll just make mountains,” Ghali said.

Heather Andrews, former Art Club president of Cosby High School, painted a poppy field landscape and also included a mountain, a reoccurring element in Ross’ paintings.

“Yeah, actually, I used to be better at drawing, but at least I’m improving in painting,” Andrews said, recalling memories of her days in high school art classes.

The event lasted for about two and a half hours, with about 19 different paintings being produced throughout the course of the event.

Christian Moehrle can be contacted at [email protected].