- In part one of One Summer Day, we under-painted the barn and completed the background.

Now we're gonna glaze and detail this barn and bring it to a complete finish.

Join me next on Painting with Wilson Bickford.

(gentle, upbeat music) Hi, thanks for joining me today.

I'm Wilson Bickford, and as you recall last time, we started part one of One Summer Day.

This is part two.

We're gonna finish this up.

In the last episode, we had under-painted the barn with our grisaille under-painting, the black and white acrylic.

We taped it out.

We put on a base coat, dropped in our background sky, mountains, trees.

Removed our tape from our land.

And now we're ready to proceed with this barn.

Are you ready?

Let's do it.

I'm gonna use a painting knife here just because it's easier to dig under that tape.

I'm gonna take this tape off, and my barn should be right under there right where I left it.

Sometimes this tape likes to be persnickety, so I'm gonna try to get it off here in bigger pieces rather than shreds if I can.

It doesn't always like to cooperate.

All right, there it is.

I got a couple little minor touches of bleed underneath the tape.

That just means I probably could have had my tape stuck down a little firmer than I did.

So that's a good lesson for you there.

Just make sure you get your tape pressed down firmly.

If that happens, it's no big deal.

It's an easy fix.

Do I look scared?

I'm not scared.

we can fix that.

Okay, from there, I'm gonna take my number six flat brush.

Now, these were the brushes that I used earlier when I did the under-painting.

I had washed those out with soap and water, so now they're ready for oil.

I'm gonna put a very, very, very thin coat of this clear glazing medium on the barn.

And because it's clear, it's like putting water on there.

You're not gonna be able to see it.

And to be honest, I can barely see it.

If I look at it just obliquely here from the side, I can kind of see the shine on it, so I know where I'm putting it.

It won't hurt if you get it down here on your land.

It's no big deal.

So, I don't have to be quite that meticulous or fancy with it.

But you want to put a nice thin coat.

This is going to wet the barn down so I can put color on and blend it, push it around.

A glaze, which is what we're gonna use for this barn, is nothing more than just transparent color, a thin wash of transparent color.

So we're gonna add color into some of this medium and throw it on here too.

This one is kind of brownish, which is fine.

This is gonna be your call.

You're gonna have to decide what you want to do with your barn.

I'm gonna give you some options here.

I'll show you down here on my palette.

If I take a little more of that glaze, and the key word is a little, just a little bit of that glaze, and a little bit of this burnt sienna, I get this rusty color.

Notice how thin it is.

It's transparent.

I don't want a lot of it on the brush.

But see, it's a very weak, thin glaze.

And I'll see if I come up here and do this, it just colorizes it.

Is that cool or what?

That's very cool, I think.

I could use any color.

Not that I'd want a purple or a blue barn, but if I use those colors and put it on, all my details show through it.

It just adds the color.

If I take that burnt sienna and add just a tiny, tiny speck of black, you'll see that it grays it down.

It makes it a little darker, like a richer brown color, like this.

It's subtle.

Just determine what color you want.

That's the beauty of it.

Now see, this is with even more black.

Watch, this will get quite a bit darker.

So it all depends on what you want.

Basically speaking, I like to have variety in it.

You'll notice this is not all just one color.

I've got two or three different values in that.

To me, that's what looks the best.

You want to rough it up.

Make it look old and tired like me.

You want an old barn.

Now see, I'm just putting a nice, thin coat on it here.

On this side, obviously you want it darker, but watch.

If I use the same exact glaze, it's already darker because my under-painting has taken care of that for me.

So the under-painting on something like this is the important part.

If you've followed my series before, I'm forgetting now this is season six.

I'm thinking it was season three, possibly.

I did a white-tail fawn deer, and I used the grisaille under-painting on that.

We had all the detail painted in on the fawn.

He was black and white.

And then we glazed him with these reds and browns and put the color to him.

It was the same idea.

But it allowed me to get a lot of detail on the fawn, where it would be hard to do that just using straight oil paint, strictly oil paint.

Well see, I'm just gonna put some of this color on like this, scrub it around, work it in.

Put it on thinly.

I don't want to see brush marks in it.

So I put it on.

If it look heavy, and I'm seeing thickness, I wipe the brush off, and I just comb through it, and it takes some of the excess off.

So from here, I just wanna play with the colors a little bit.

I'm gonna take a little more of that rusty color, the burnt sienna, and here and there, I'm just gonna add a little bit of that, maybe a little bit over here.

Just make it look uneven and imperfect.

If there's anything that's not perfect, it's an old barn.

You want it to have some character.

I got a little bit of advice for you folks too.

This has nothing to do with what we're doing here on this project.

But do you know, just good, old-fashioned advice.

You should never date an artist.

Do you know why?

They're pretty sketchy.

Always remember.

Don't ever forget.

Words of wisdom from Willy right there.

Yeah, I know that was corny, but that's okay.

See how I'm kind of roughing it up?

I'm gonna go a little darker, maybe over on this side too, on the shadowed side.

A few extra touches here and there.

But see how that really comes to life?

It just really sets it off.

Notice there are cast shadows under the eave line here, under the roof eave.

And there's a cast shadow from the eave on the face of the barn here.

So I need to go darker with that.

It's a cast shadow.

Cast shadows are always darker like I told you before in other shows.

Cast shadows are always darker than form shadows.

It's where the light it literally blocked out.

So I'm gonna take some of that sienna, a little bit of black, and I'm gonna have to test this to see if it works.

Eh, kind of.

Might need to go just a trifle darker.

Let me try it this way.

Think I'll have better success doing it this way rather than pulling down.

Notice I get right up here and steady one arm on the other.

So, I get kind of a consistent line.

See how that looks like a cast shadow up under there?

But the details, all the little cracks and stuff in the barn would still show.

This one here is shorter, so I'll have to do little vertical strokes like this.

The shadows make all the difference in this.

That's what makes it look three-dimensional, makes it look realistic.

It's the shadows.

So don't forget your shadows, guys.

I can actually put just a little touch over here as well.

This is kind of in the shadows.

Anyway, you're not gonna notice it as much 'cause it's already dark.

But if I go a little darker, I can get that to show up.

Now I'm gonna come back and restate some of those highlights on that, on the barn board itself.

We'll keep plugging away here for right now.

I'm gonna put a little bit of color on the stonework.

I don't want that to be too brownish.

I'm thinking just old mortar and stone.

So I'll take a little bit of this brownish stuff, very little, just enough to say so, just to put a little hint of color in there on those rocks as the mortar in that foundation.

I love those old stone foundations.

They have so much character, and they're really easy to paint.

Base it in with the mortar color and just put the rocks in down evenly so they look like they were stacked in, being able to fit.

Actually, my old house that I lived in has an old stone foundation like this down cellar.

If it could talk, oh, what a story it would tell.

So see how easily that falls together?

Now I'm gonna move on to the roofs.

And like I said, we'll come back and add some detailing on these barn boards too.

If this is more of a like a metal roof, I like kind of grayish.

Sometimes you'll see a metal roof has more of a blueish cast because it's shiny metal, if it's still shiny and not completely rusted and old.

But you'll see where the sun bounces of it and reflects into it and you see the blues.

So I'm gonna try this.

I'm gonna go with a, I've swished the brush out in my mineral spirits.

I'm gonna take clear glazing medium, a little bit of cobalt blue, and I'm gonna make it blue first.

See all the work on this, like I said before, is in the under-painting.

See, I don't have to worry about any detail.

I'm just putting colors on here.

This is the fun part.

This is where it really gets fun.

All the hard work is behind me.

So you wanna take time, take your time with that under-painting and do a good job on it.

Now see, I can actually leave some of this gray under-painting showing through 'cause it's got clear glaze over the top.

So, it looks like it's painted.

It'll have the same finish and shine.

It'll just show through gray if I leave patches of it, which is fine.

See, this one I did go a little more gray.

I left more of the gray showing through this one.

I'm putting a little more blue in like you're getting the sky reflected into it.

It's all good.

It depends on what you want.

There is no right or wrong with art.

That's the cool part of it.

Do it your way.

Have fun with it.

Okay, from there, I'm gonna take some burnt sienna.

I've wiped this brush off.

I'm gonna take some burnt sienna, kind of dry.

I'm not gonna put any medium or thinner with it.

I'm gonna load the brush up like this.

Kind of a dry brush technique.

And right here, I'm just gonna pull down.

I can put a little bit of rust on the roof.

Oh, that looks good, don't you think?

Yeah, I think so.

That looks pretty good.

You don't wanna maybe rust the whole thing, so I just randomly put a little here, a little there just to give it some character.

A little bit over on this side.

Usually typically, the rust starts at the top up here and runs down, but you could have some down here on the lower portion of it too.

It's all good.

All right, now you got that little bit of bleed underneath my eave line there, and I knew that from my tape.

Remember I mentioned that earlier.

I'm just gonna swish that brush out and set it to the side.

I'm gonna take my detailed scriptliner.

And I'll thin down some of this ivory black with paint thinner.

I'll touch that edge up.

As I said earlier, it's an easy fix.

Don't let something like that freak you out.

Everything in the painting is fixable.

I'm gonna lay my hand here on the dry portion of this to steady it.

And I can touch that edge up just that easily right there.

I'm talking funny 'cause I'm holding my breath as I do that to steady my hand.

All right, just as easy as that.

Now notice on this one, it looks like there is glass in the windows.

If I use a little bit of blueish tone so it looks like the sky is reflecting into the glass, I can make that look like they're glassed in and rather than just open-holed.

Some of these are just open doorways and open windows.

I would leave them.

For the ones that I want glassed-in, and maybe on your underpainting, maybe you did more cross pieces in some of your other windows.

Maybe you have more windows.

You can glass-in as many as you want.

It's all good.

That's what I say.

You don't necessarily have to use my design and my sketch.

You're more than welcome to, obviously, but you can't do your own thing and use your own photos, your own drawing.

I'm gonna put a little bit of blue in here.

I'm not crowding out all of the black.

I want some of that black to show through.

I'm gonna put it on like that just so you're getting a glint of light.

I'm gonna swish it out and dry the brush off and come back and just kind of tap and fidget with it just to kind of push it around a little bit.

It's probably hard to see, but it's not all just one value.

Some of it looks a little grayer where the black shows through it where I'm thinning it down over the surface.

And usually I like to take a little bit of white at the end.

This is the white base coat that's already thin, so it'll bond very easily.

I'm gonna roll some of that on the point of the brush.

And if I just put something a little lighter in a couple of them, it makes it look like either you got a really strong glint of light hitting it, or maybe some of the cloud is reflected into it, some of the white clouds.

It just breaks it up.

You don't want all the windows the same.

I notice the window on my shadow side because my glaze is darker.

This window doesn't show as well.

It's there, but notice how this one's more black, and it shows up better, more contrast?

So that's an adjustment.

I'm gonna try to take some of this black and try to blacken this down a little more.

Ah, that did it.

I can see it a lot better now.

I can actually take a brownish color with a little bit of white, and I can outline that, put a framework around it like a molding if I wanted to, window casing.

I think I'll leave it like that.

That looks pretty good.

That made it show up better.

That's nicer.

Okay, now, I want to show you this.

This was an option on your list.

You didn't really need it.

I do have some cadmium red deep here.

Maybe this was an old barn that was painted red at one time, and now all the paint's warn off, and it's kind of turning grayish and brownish gray.

It's kind of reverting back to what it was originally.

So with that in mind, I'm just going to dry brush a little red on there.

Now way back when when I first glazed that, I could have used that red and just made this a red barn, truly a red barn.

So that's always an option too if you wanted to do something like that and have a red barn.

The process would be the same.

Instead of using the burnt sienna and black, you would use the red just like I did before.

I'm gonna take this very dry, no medium.

I'm loading the brush like this, and I'm just gonna very lightly skim here and there.

Put a few little touches of red on there.

And you'll see up close that it looks like, where because I'm using the backside of the brush, it skims over the tooth of the canvas, the little bumps, so it's broken and kind of dotted.

It looks rough like it's warn away.

If I were to come in and do it with the end of the brush and work it into those little hills and gullies in the weave of the canvas, it'd be solid red.

That's what I don't wanna do.

Ooh, I got some white on there from somewhere.

But I'm dry-brushing it on a little bit here, a little bit there.

It's an option.

I'm just showing you what's possible.

You don't have to put red on yours if you don't want to.

Some of you I'm sure won't like it.

Some of you are gonna love it and wouldn't wanna do it any other way.

That's what art's all about.

See, that kind of changes the feel of it a little bit.

Okay, I'm gonna set that brush to the side.

I'm gonna go back to my detailed scriptliner.

I'm gonna highlight some of these boards on the face of the barn.

I'm gonna take white base coat, a little bit of the sienna and the gray stuff that we had before.

I do have to thin this down with paint thinner.

Maybe something like that.

I don't know until I get it on my canvas if this is gonna be light enough to make a difference.

It's gonna be close.

I'm gonna have to go a little lighter so I can see individual boards on here a little bit between my cracks.

That's almost starting to do it, but I need to go just a trifle lighter.

I could even put a little touch of yellow with that just to warm it up.

That gives it a lighter yellowy tan color like the sunlight hitting it.

See, I just wanna pull some of the barn boards out a little more.

See how it kind of breaks it up and gives it a different lighting effect?

That's pretty cool.

Don't do them all.

A little here, a little there is more than enough.

See how that breaks it up?

I can put a little bit over on this one too if I wanted to.

It's all good.

The light could basically hit anywhere.

You just gotta figure some of the boards are twisted and warped and bent.

They're turned out a little bit where they're catching the light, where the one next to it might not be.

On this side, you don't wanna do too much because that's the shadowed side.

But having said that, this one I didn't do it, so we're ad-libbing here.

I got a couple minutes.

I think I can afford to do this.

I'm gonna use something blueish.

If I take the cobalt blue with some white and little bit of that burnt sienna just to gray it down.

I don't want it to be too blue-blue.

It's very common on the shadowed side of something to use a blueish tone.

So see, I can do the same idea as I'm doing on the front, but I wouldn't want to use that light color 'cause this is in shadow.

If I put a little few streaks of that blue, it's a cooler temperature.

A lot of people always forget about color temperature.

Color temperature has a lot to do with a painting.

See how a little bit of subtle blue makes it look really like it's cooler and on the shadowed side?

Don't do it to death.

Don't need much.

All right, I think that's coming along pretty well.

But that's basically how I did the barn.

So, you can do that with any subject.

I've done deer.

Like I said, I do ducks.

I do lighthouses.

I've done old cars.

A lot of times, if I want a lot of detail, I do it that way with the grisaille, and then I put the oil color over it.

It still has the integrity and the rich saturated color of an oil painting, but it gives me the detail that I want, that it would be hard to get just by doing it in one sitting with oils.

(gentle, upbeat music) When your painting's completed, you can try adding a fence to it.

I recommend doing it on the dry canvas, and then if you don't like it, you can take it off if you make a mistake.

If you take a mixture of burnt sienna and black, see, we can start with some posts here.

In the interest of perspective, they are gonna be taller and bigger as they're coming forward if you've got them coming angled towards the viewer.

See, this is dry, so I can lay my hand on it.

You want them spaced further apart as they come lower.

Make sure that they are taller and wider.

You can swish that out, and you would take just a touch of a darker green.

Because the light's coming from the right, you're gonna have cast shadows going this way, which will help anchor them down.

And if something happened that you make a mistake like that, and you don't like it, take a rag with just a little bit of damp thinner.

And it's etch-a-sketch.

No harm done.

Give it a try.

Okay, I'm gonna move on down to the foreground here.

I'm gonna use my large texture brush.

And I can work right into some of this, start as a base right into some of this color I had before.

This is the white and yellow I had on my background trees.

I'm gonna put just a little touch of sap green with that.

I want to start lighter and brighter up by the barn.

Notice there's a nice glow up by the barn.

The canvas is dry.

We don't have any base coat down here.

So whatever I put down here will stay exactly the way I mix it as far as the lightness or darkness.

It won't lighten up by picking up base coat, which is why I didn't want a base coat there to begin with.

All right, now see, just by holding it horizontally and tapping it, it's pretty good for giving me a grass effect.

I want to box it in a little darker on the edges and especially down here at the bottom, so it leaves a nice glow back by our subject.

So I just keep adding more green.

I'm gonna even put a little bit of blue with that to cool it down a little bit.

As it's getting away from that warm glow, I want it more cool under the shadows.

Let's see, I'm going to kind of go around that glow.

But then I will have to encroach into it and marry those colors together.

So see, I just use a lighter touch, and you just want a gradual transition coming out from there.

I'm gonna go a little darker with more blue and green.

I'm gonna really put some blue on this this time on to really get a nice blue-green going.

You know me and my blue.

I gotta throw some more blue in here.

That was a given.

You knew that was coming, didn't you?

If you know me at all, you knew I was gonna put more blue in there.

And I just wanna get darker and darker the lower I come, so I'm just gonna use more blue and green with a little bit of black.

And I'm not afraid to have it quite dark like this down here.

See, it's a really, really dark green.

That's gonna force the viewer's eye back to that glow and back to the barn right where I want them to be looking.

If you get the opportunity to do this lesson, and I hope you do, please send me a photo.

I'd love to see what you do with it.

I get people sending me photos from literally all over the world.

They follow me on Facebook and on my website, and I always tell them send me some photos of what you're doing.

I like to see what people are up to.

All right, see how that establishes that nice glow?

Even if the barn wasn't there, your eye gravitates right towards that light spot, draws you right in like a magnet.

Since that brush is so dirty, I'm gonna take more yellow and white, and I'll take it on my fan brush.

And I really want to get some emphasis back here by the barn.

Now see, this one's more of a whitish yellow.

I'm going more yellow-yellow right now.

And I did put just a little touch of medium with that just to thin it down to make it come off the brush.

I'm thinking sunlight, so I'm going a little bit lighter, brighter, more yellowy.

And this is the same palette of colors I used.

I'm just mixing them different now.

I'm using more yellow, where that one, I had a little more white with my green.

Now I'm using more yellow just to show you.

It's all good.

I'm just trying to emphasize that glow.

I have some wildflowers in the meadow, so I'm gonna swish out my fan brush.

And again, you could use any color.

I could use some of that red.

I could put pink flowers in here if I chose to.

I'm gonna go with white 'cause it's the white base coat.

I do have a little thinner.

If you watch my palette down here, the idea is to let the bristles snap forward like this and spray little random dots.

That's called spattering.

It's a common technique that I do quite often.

You can use it for falling snowflakes in a snow scene.

You can use it for flowers in the meadow like we're doing here, stars in a nighttime sky.

And I'm just real very careful, releasing a few bristles at a time.

I'm trying to target it where I want it.

I've gotten pretty good at being able to steer it over 30 years of doing this.

Down here, you'll notice they are cooler, why?

That's right, I heard somebody in Tallahassee, Florida.

They said color temperature.

You bet, the color temperature and shadows.

If I go more blueish, down here they look like they're kind of coming over the hill into the shadows.

See how it's darker down here anyway?

Rather than to put them all in one color, see how it gives it more shape and interest on your canvas?

Okay, I'm gonna take my liner.

I'm gonna plop a bird in the sky here with some gray-blue.

I hope you give this a shot.

Send me a copy of it.

Thanks for tuning in.

Until next time, stay creative and keep painting.

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