Wilson Bickford: Last week we started Birch forest with an acrylic under painting, now we're going to finish it off with oil glazes and really enrich these colors.

Join me next on Painting with Wilson Bickford.

[MUSIC] [MUSIC] Thanks for joining me again today on Painting with Wilson Bickford.

As you recall last week we had started the Birch forest project.

We had under painted it with acrylics up to this point, today we're moving onto the oil phase.

You'll find that there's a list that you can download for the materials as I'm going to run through them here but you can print this off for your convenience at home from the PBS site, WPBS site.

For oil colors today I'm going to be using academy yellow pale, sap green, ivory black, ultramarine blue and titanium white.

I also have some alkid-based clear glazing medium here that I'm going to lubricate the whole canvas with so we're getting a glaze effect over the top of this dried acrylic under painting.

For brushes and tools I'm going to be using a two-inch scenery brush for putting on the glazing medium and taking the bigger swathe through there.

I'm going to be using a number ten flat brush.

I'll be using the mop brush to soften those sun rays a little bit as we work.

I'm going to use a large texture brush for work on the grass.

I'm going to be using a fan brush for the actual sun rays, and maybe some of the grass texture as well.

I also have the little small number six flat here in case I need it.

Might be handy in some of these smaller areas than I'm working on in the trees.

I have a number two liner and a small painting knife, which I'm going to use for the Birch trees in putting those characteristic dark markings on those, gives a nice rough texture, more so than a brush.

Okay, let's get started with this.

I'm going to take my two-inch scenery brush with some of this clear glazing medium.

I'm going to put a thin coat over the whole canvas.

Now remember last week we had the trees on here, those Birch trees are still on there, they're underneath the tape.

We need to apply all this background first before we expose those trees and develop them, we'll bring those forward.

Put this on sparingly, I'm taking just a little bit and scrubbing it into the weave of the canvas, it's doesn't take much.

Now the only way you can tell this because it's clear, there's no contrast, you almost have to hold it back and look at it in the glare of the light.

I can see it here, I can see a little bit of a soft shine so I can tell where I'm putting it, just make sure you get the whole canvas covered uniformly and very thinly.

Here comes the exciting part, watch this.

I'm going to take the same brush, a little bit of the academy yellow pale.

This is a glaze, this will be applied very thinly, we'll see all the details right through that.

I'm going to pour some sunshine on in here.

Phew!

Pretty exciting, huh?

Don't that look great?

Now ultimately I'm going to put the sunspot in there with the rays coming out, but see anywhere that's the white, it picks up the yellow, the white canvas that showed through in between the sponging, and this one's a little darker yellow than this, I realize that, I'm not trying to match that one exactly.

I've already done that painting once, why do it twice?

I'm using the same exact colors, same approach, just to show you how I did it.

You could actually use maybe some red rose deep or cadmium red light in here and have more of a pinkish glow coming through from the background.

If it's sun up or sun down, whatever you think it is you can adjust your colors accordingly.

So I'm pretty much going to cover the whole woods area.

See how that glaze really sets that off, and I'm getting a little glaze on the trees, I can come back and wipe that down a little bit if your trees start looking a little greenish because they were blue, we're putting the transparent yellow glaze over it, it's going to colorize them a little bit, but we can wipe those back if it bothers you.

I don't mind a little bit of the color on there because they're a white tree basically and they're picking up the surrounding colors.

But I'll show you how to do that momentarily.

I'm going to take a little bit of sap green now into this same brush and you'll notice the greens are much richer in this painting over here too, on the outside edges especially.

So I'm going to take a little bit of the sap green, not much paint, don't need much.

I want to apply it thinly.

You'll see how this changes the green in there, see that?

And I realize it's obscuring those Birch trees somewhat but I'm going to show you how to adjust that.

It depends on how green you want this.

I could even put a little bit of blue in my green.

See if I took the sap green like this and added a little bit of the ultramarine blue.

It gives me a different flavor of green, cooler green.

It's ultimately a little darker but I want it darker on the outside edges so it forces the viewer's eye to the center where that sunspot is and those rays are coming from.

We'll see how that changes that sponging so much and gives it a nice rich color.

To adjust that and bring some of that back, the Birches, I can simply take a paper towel like this and wipe some of the glaze off.

If I really wanted to target the trees, I can.

Now I've still got to come back and put some white highlighting on those trees, I'm going to put a little bit on those.

So if they're a little obscure now and in the shadows, that's fine.

But if you want to bring them back a little more sharply, I take a towel and I fold it up like this, and I come in and I just wipe some of that glaze off.

See how they come back more distinctly and they're bluer, like they were originally?

So it's an easy adjustment, and I know that going in, that's why I don't have to worry about being too fancy around the trees and try to avoid them.

I know that I can reclaim them just by doing this.

It's a good idea to fold your rag to a clean spot every time, so you're taking off glaze and not just moving it from one spot to another.

See it doesn't take much.

See how good that looks as far as the woods?

And when we rip these other Birch trees off the tape, off these foreground Birch trees, they're going to really standout much closer to us and give us a lot of depth in this painting.

I have themes very similar to this that I teach in my workshops, they're always very popular, people love doing these woodsy scenes.

And they like Birch trees in general.

So this gives us kind of the best of everything.

There, that was pretty easy, right?

Okay, from there I need to start thinking about the glow.

I'm going to be using a mop brush to blend it, I'm going to apply paint with the fan brush.

Basically all I need to do is take a small amount of titanium white.

I'm going to chisel up the fan brush.

Not much paint, it's a good idea if you load it like this to actually take a towel and wipe some off, you don't need much paint.

The rays need to be translucent.

Transparent means you can see right through it completely.

Translucent means you see through it a little bit, yet it's a little milky.

Opaque means you can't see through it at all, so you want to go between opaque and transparent to translucent.

You should be able to see through this.

Notice how on these rays you can actually see the Birch trees through that.

That's translucence, you want this to be translucent.

Pick a spot where you think your sun is emanating from and I'm going to put a little bit of a white spot right there, just to designate that.

I'm going to come back and work on that.

I'm going to put a little circle like this and fluff it in, and right from the middle of that, think of that as a doughnut in your -- all your rays are coming right from the middle of the hole in the doughnut.

You can't have them coming every which way off that circle, they need to come right from dead center.

And it doesn't matter what angle you put them, some people like to put them upwards because the sun coming through, the rays can go all the way around, any which way.

I usually have them coming down into the painting rather than out of the painting upward, and I'm going to go right in front of those Birch trees in the background.

Keep it as straight as you possibly can, they look pretty harsh right now, we're going to come back and blend them and soften them, which will take some of the paint off and give us that translucence that we were talking about.

Make sure some are a little narrower, some are a little wider.

Now it's important that you put your glaze on very sparingly.

Notice I'm not picking up a lot of the green in my rays.

I am a little bit, I can tell on my palette I have picked up a little bit of dirt just by mixing it into my brush here, I can tell.

But it's minimal, then you want it to be minimal.

Keep some of the rays narrower, make some of them a little wider.

I think I want to make this one here a little wider, they shouldn't all be uniform.

Vary the spacing.

Notice the two are closer together, this one's a little further away from the group.

Don't do anything that's going to be too much of a pattern.

If I get down in here I don't really care because I can cover that with my grass, bring them down, be lower your grass line.

And you -- ideally you want an odd number of these, so I'm going to shoot for five maybe.

I can squeeze them in here.

Now see they still look kind of harsh.

I'm going to put a little skinnier one up here and out a little flatter.

And I try to make them a little more dominant here and use less pressure as I go outwards so they're kind of fading away.

And I'm going to make this spot a little bigger now, I'm just fluffing out a little bit of the paint with the corner of the brush.

And then we're going to make these a little more translucent.

If I take my mop brush, which is nice and soft for blending.

You're going to want to wipe this brush off as you proceed, it'll pick up a little bit of that white but see I can get it back to where you could just about see through it, a little bit.

Now you can rub these out to the point where they don't even show anymore, you rub they right off your canvas, so be careful that you don't take off too much.

If you do you just simply put the white back on, it's an easy fix.

Most people I've noticed in my classes, just from doing classes for 25 years, everybody likes to do everything to the extreme.

A lot of times you have to know when to quit on any certain technique.

See I'm getting it down here on the grass, it doesn't matter.

I can wipe it back or I can just cover it when I put my grass texture in later.

So not a big deal, I'm not concerned with that at all.

Don't sweat the small details.

See that's getting very transparent.

Here's a neat little trick too: those trees in the background are at varying depths to us, so maybe the rays -- some of the rays come in front of the tree here and there and they're behind other trees.

Watch this, if I were to take this and remove the ray off that one Birch tree it looks like the ray is behind it.

See that?

And maybe I'll do the same thing on this one -- don't do it on every one but you'll notice it kind of makes the light go at different levels in behind there which is really nice.

Looks more natural.

Because light does that, if you walked through the forest and you see rays like this you'll see that, that kind of goes in and out between things because everything's at a different level to us.

So just a few of those little touches make a big difference.

Alright, and I want it fairly bright.

Right in this spot, so I'm just going to sweeten that up by putting in a little more white.

Now if you wanted as an option you could put a little more yellow in it.

Don't get it so yellow that it doesn't show up against your background yellow though, the glaze, because yellow on yellow's not going to show, you have to have different values or different colors.

But if you want to warm that up more like sunlight but still keep it bright enough it's going to totally depend on how dark your glaze is in the background.

See, I can put a little bit of yellow with that, and it looks like we got that nice glare coming out.

Ultimately your mop brush is your best friend for this, you can just soften everything out very lightly.

Whatever needs be done.

Okay, I'm going to take my painting knife and on these background trees I'm going to put a little bit of light on them.

So actually just the white of the Birch bark showing, but I'm going to take my knife like this with some white, put it out flat on my palette, wipe the excess off, you'll see I'm going to get just a little bead round the edge of the blade, like that.

And depending on where I'm putting it, if I'm putting it on trees on this side it's nice to have it on what I would call my topside edge if I were holding it this way.

If I'm doing this side it's easier to put it on the bottom edge of the blade, so I load it differently just to get a different hand angle, something that's easier for me.

If that light's coming through that's probably going to be kissing the edges of these trunks just a little bit here and there.

And the light is going to come through different angles, it doesn't have to hit -- you know, on the same level everywhere.

All these trees are at different angles, the light's filtering through leaves and whatnot so it's kind of disturbed a little bit in its path.

I wiped the blade off periodically as I'm doing that because as I'm touching into that I am picking up some of the green and the yellow glaze on my knife.

So see if you just kind of work it in a little bit, see how it gives that nice lighting effect.

I want to do less as I come over here, so I might not put much at all over here.

I want most of the dominance, this is our focal area.

Now likewise the light's coming through here so where it hit on the right hand side of these trunks now it's going to hit on the left hand side of these trunks, because the sun is on the opposite side.

This is where I load it on the other end, this is kind of on the bottom, what I would call the bottom of my blade.

Instead of having to do this I can just come in this way, it's a little bit friendlier hand angle for me.

And you could put this on with a brush too, you could actually take a liner brush and just put your white lines on the -- you'll see up close at this -- it just really gives you a rougher texture because the knife rides over on the bumps of the weave of the canvas, and it leaves it a little more rough and textured, like bark, it's not as smooth as what the brush would be so I prefer to use the knife to apply this.

I'm going to put a little extra brightness right down here at the base of that one I think is going to be nice.

As I'm doing this I'm just kind of scrutinizing the whole thing and analyzing it and see what I think.

And yours will be different because your trees will probably be laid in a slightly different configuration than what I ended up with, and that's cool.

It's all good.

We just look at it and do it in the way that you see it needs to be done, what looks right to you.

Like I said, I want less over here so I'm not going to put much on these trees over here.

If I get too busy on the outside edges everybody's going to be looking over here, I want them looking at my focal point.

And we're going to start putting in the background grasses.

Once we get the background in behind here we can pull the tape off, start developing those foreground Birches.

Well see that looks pretty woodsy, doesn't it?

That's pretty cool.

I love working with the sponges and the under paint, it just makes it easy.

I'm going to switch over to my large texture brush and I'm going to stamp in some grass.

I want it a little lighter up here in the sun glow area, closer here and darker around the outer fringes.

I must start with white, little bit of the academy yellow pale.

A touch of green.

I don't want it pure yellow but I definitely want a warmer yellow-green to start out.

And painting is a lot like making soup or baking whatever, you always have to test it, taste it and see what it needs.

I'm going to try that, it might be brighter, it might not be bright enough.

I think that's about what I want.

Now this area's dry, it's got the clear glaze on it, it's still a little damp, so it's blendable, I can work the colors together a little easier, but the point is that the dark grey-green is not going to lift, so whatever I lay down here is going to stay exactly the color that I put.

And see if I just -- I'm kind of doing a downward tap and letting the bristles spread out a little bit.

Let the dark color show through it, don't cover it up all that dark undertone, that's the shadows within the grass, that's why we put it in there.

See how it gives it the depth, if you cover it in solid it's just a solid spotty yellow, and it's not going to be open and it's not going to look grassy, it's not going to look good at all.

If that happens you can simply take a rag right now with a little bit of thinner, you could wipe all that grass area down, right back to the under painting and start over again.

That's the beauty of it.

The under painting is not going away, it's still in there.

As I get further towards the edges I want to go darker, so I'm going to take the same color, I'm going to add a little more green, a little bit of blue, which will darken it but also make it cooler.

I want it cooler back in the shadows and more yellow and warmer in that sunspot.

Okay, that's looking pretty good.

See I'm going to cut the rays right off, like I said earlier.

They're kind of up over the hill where they stop.

[Brush tapping] And work this into the previous yellow so there's not a real hard edge between the two, if you just kind of tap them together they will melt into each other.

I want to go a little bit darker yet, even on the very outside edges.

I'm going to take a little more blue, a speck of the ivory black.

And it might almost match my under painting tone and that's fine, but the difference is you'll see texture in this where the sponge work doesn't really have a texture in it, this will have an actual physical texture in it that you can see and feel when it's dry.

I just want to go darker.

You'll see that by framing it even darker on the edges it forces the viewer's eye to our focal point which is exactly what we want.

You always want to think of your focal point when you're painting, when you're designing your paintings.

You need something that's going to lead the viewer in and keep them anchored there and keep their interest for a while.

I'm going to go one more pass darker a little bit.

I'm going to add a little more blue, a little more black, I don't want this to be black-black but it's going to be a dark-dark blue-green in reality.

I'll go a little darker down here.

I'm going to switch over and take a fan brush and I'm going to spatter a little extra texture and wild flowery things in here.

So if I take my fan brush with some white and I do have some paint thinner here, this is odorless mineral spirits.

Going to loosen that up, thin it down a little bit.

If I pull the bristles back and let them snap forward it gives me little dots, which is called spatter.

And it kind of gives you a little extra texture, a little more interest, it looks like you've got little wildflowers and stuff in there.

Pretty cool, huh?

You can use other colors, I'm just using white because it's going to contrast nicely.

You could use colors in there, if you wanted little pink flowers or whatever, add different colors into that, purple flowers, blue flowers, it's all good.

Okay, the moment of truth.

I'm going to remove the tape from the Birches.

And I'm going to glaze some blue on those, I don't need to actually apply white paint to them, I'm going to let the white of the canvas do the job.

It'll be a glaze.

So I'm going to take my number ten flat brush, I'm going to make sure this is clean.

I'm going to apply a very, very thin coat of glazing medium to the Birch trees.

Scrub it on very thinly and just lubricate all the white areas.

I'll be back in just a minute.

[MUSIC] Painting is all about contrast, so when you get your painting done you can look at it and analyze it, if you want a little bit brighter sense of light in the sky just take a little bit of white, brighten your sunspot, and you can also balance it out by making a little bit brighter grass color here to correspond with that.

Think lights and darks and give your painting some pop.

I've applied the clear glazing medium to the white part of the Birch trees, I'm mixing up a shadow glaze which is ultramarine blue and a little bit of black.

Be careful with the black, it's very strong.

I want a bluish grey shadow color for the backsides of the trees.

Now notice the sun's coming from here so it'll be the left hand side of these two that shadow and the right hand side of this one, think of your light source.

I'm going to come in like this and this has no white in it, this is just blue and black, they're both transparent colors by nature.

And you'll see if I put a little bit of shading, it doesn't have to be completely smooth, this is not a smooth metal steel pipe, it's perfectly cylindrical.

So if you got some flat spots over here on where they blend that's fine.

Don't be too technical with it.

Now I'm applying this first and I'll show you how to smooth that out.

And then we're going to put on those dark characteristic Birch markings with a palette knife -- painting knife.

Now this one will be on this side.

Notice how three-dimensional the trees look now, this really makes them look rounded.

And I really don't need to use white paint on these, I'm just simply going to let that white of the canvas show through.

Now you could, but what you're going to run into is if you put the black on then you go to put white you're going to mix them together, you're going to get grey because this black is still going to be very wet.

So as long as I've got that glaze on there the area still looks like it's painted.

It'll be glossy, just like the rest of the paint, so it looks like it's finished, so I really don't need to use white.

Notice how that makes them look rounded?

I'm going to take my painting knife with black.

Take a little bit on the edge of the blade, not much at all.

And if I just lightly kind of skim across and deposit these dark accents on the tree -- I work from both sides, from the left and the right inward.

Use very little paint to start out, I have not much paint on this blade at all.

It doesn't take much, and vary the places where you put them, let them wrap around from the outside edge into the tree.

It doesn't take much for them to start saying hey, I'm a Birch tree.

So you just put this in -- now be careful, it's easy to overdo it, you get too much.

One of the trees just have too much black, I'm going to leave a lot of white, these trees are characteristic of having a lot of white on them.

Okay, I've just about got this finished up.

I've added the dark characteristic marking of these Birch trees and looks pretty good, don't you think?

They came a long way from that under painting stage.

Well, thanks for joining me, I hope you enjoyed this lesson.

Until next time, stay creative and keep painting, guys.

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