Wilson Bickford: Old cars and trucks tell a story and have a lot of character and they make great painting subjects.

Join me next on painting with Wilson Bickford as we go out to pasture.

[Music] [Music] Hi andthanks for joining me today.

I'm going to show you how to paint one of my all-time favorite subjects, I love painting old trucks.

My wife and I drive around the back roads sometimes and get photos of these old relics that are just setting out to pasture, which is the title of today's painting.

Old trucks and cars, they've kind of served their useful purpose, they've kind of turned into rusty icons and just setting out to pasture, so today I'm going to show you how I'm going to do this painting.

Even though it's an oil painting, we're going to start with an acrylic underpainting for the truck itself, and if you go on the WPBS website, you'll have access to a sketch to print off, and I just use transfer paper to put the sketch on.

There's also a supply list with all of the supplies that you need necessary for this project, and there are also a couple of photos on there that you can download in color like this to show you the progression about how I get to this point.

You start with this, it comes with a blue on some of the metal on the chrome up to this point so that you download these as a reference as you paint this in, and I'm going to show you right now how I got to this point.

I do have a print out here that's enlarged, it's the same sketch just blown up, and this is on just cardstock, heavy paper.

I'm going to show you how I achieved it and got to this point.

I used some acrylics for this, this is black gesso, white gesso, a brown acrylic and a blue acrylic.

For the most part what I need for this is just a #6 round brush.

This will do most of the work for me, especially on this size.

I'm not going to be working this big, I'm just showing you here, but on here - obviously it's a smaller area, but I just used varying mixtures.

You want to make sure all of your planes are showing up so it shows the roundness and curve; you've got light and shadow in there.

In this area - this is already filled in, but it would be white where you transferred it.

All of the black areas are simply filled in with this black acrylic.

Now this isn't going to show very well on this print out because it's black on black.

All these black areas, and again, you'll have this reference; just fill in all these dark areas in with a solid black.

I do have a little cup of water sitting off to the side that if your paint is a little thick, get a couple of drops of water to thin your paint down so that all those black areas are just filled in with solid black.

From there, I've taken some white with a little bit of the brown - and this looks very rusty, it's more orangey but we're going to put oil glazes of burnt sienna over that later which will make it more rusty looking so this is going start out kind of brownish like this.

So I just take the brown and white and kind of fill in everywhere else.

Be conscious of your planes, where those are, you don't want to lose sight of those.

Again, like I said, you're going to have this sketch to look at with all the colors on it so it's a pretty easy process.

This is going to be the time consuming part, the painting itself after this will go fairly smoothly, fairly quickly.

All of the hard work - I don't want to say hard, but the time consuming work is in the truck.

You want to get it nicely like this, what you see is pretty much what you're going to have, although we're going to add other colors to it and enhance it, but you still want to describe all the colors and all the shapes and the basic form and dimension of the old vehicle.

I just paint this in with the browns on the lighter sides here where I want more highlight, I added white to the brown and I just simply painted those rounder shapes to give it the shape and the form.

Make sure all of your planes differentiate.

Notice that I can tell every plane on there because I run the balance between light and dark, so you can actually see every facet.

Notice that the fender here is a little lighter than the dark color around it so it shows up.

I did take some white and grey with a liner and I painted in a little sense of the steering wheel in there.

Notice that the window, the back window is open, we see sky through it, so obviously you paint around that.

Once I had gotten to that point with all the browns and the black, you swish your brush out and I took some of the blue and this is kind of meant to be like a chrome metal color, the shadow color, we're going to enhance it with white later on so it looks like it has a glare on it.

All these metal areas, chrome areas on here around the headlight, and if this is too much brush for you, this one will roll to a nice point, this #6 round, but if that's too much brush, use one of your liner brushes or a smaller brush, the bumper is filled in with blue as well.

All the chrome around the radiator; and that brings you to this point.

The last thing I've done on here is take a little touch of white, and on the top of that shroud around the radiator, I put just a little glimmer of light with some white there.

We can do that later in the oil phase even if you don't do it right now.

Some of this is just easier to get done now, than we don't have to worry about it later.

Here to get a sense of the actual headlights in there I some blue and white with a spec of black and made something kind of a greyish and I just kind of tapped it like this and you can actually smudge it with your finger a little bit, it gives you a little sense of the headlight in there.

Notice I left it dark around the edges so it looks like you've got a beveled piece of glass in there in the shadows around the outside, then I took a little bit of white - and you don't want to highlight them both the same necessarily, but I put a little glimmer of light right on that one headlight, and that's pretty much it.

You just need to work it up to this level and like I said you're going to have those sketches, which makes it really easy for you.

Start with this and build up to this and you can take all the time in the world that you need to get to this point, whatever you see is pretty much what you're going to get so it's worth it to take your time to do a good job on that.

This is acrylic so I do have a pail of water here sitting next to me, I'm going to put that in.

Make sure while you're letting this dry you wash the acrylic out of your brush.

From here on out we're done with the acrylic, make sure this is absolutely dry.

You can toss your acrylic plate, rinse your brush out in water, wash everything out.

When this is dry I come back and I'm going to take this out.

Now, this is the same procedure when I paint at home.

A lot of people see my paintings that I post on social media and on my website and what not, this is the same exact procedure I use at home, you are seeing me paint at home right here.

I take some tape - this is just regular every day masking tape from my local hardware store, nothing fancy.

Everyone else questions my tape and wants to know what I'm doing, there's no magic to this, this is just tape.

I will say don't use an old roll that you've had kicking around for a long time because old tape sometimes gets a little funny.

It either won't stick well enough or sticks too well and leaves a gummy residue, go out and get a fresh roll of tape, that will be your best bet.

Press this down really firmly.

What I want to do it block out the truck so I could just freely paint the background over the top, but I don't have to paint around the truck, which would be nearly impossible.

I'm going to use a craft utility knife with a #11 blade like this.

Probably the first place to start is right in that window.

I need to take that out because there's going to be sky in there so I've got to have that open, and you'll see it doesn't take much pressure to cut through just the tape and not cut into your canvas.

Now I'm using a panel here, 12 by 16 canvas panel, but I do this all the time on stretch canvas as well, you just got to use a nice sharp blade and don't use a lot of pressure.

Now see there's the window out and now I just simply need to go around the perimeter of the truck and take off everything that's not part of the truck, so the truck itself will just be completely covered up and protected, it's going to make our life much easier when we go to paint this in, so see if you just trim that like that, it's a pretty easy process.

So I'm going to finish this up and I'll come back and we'll start in on the oil painting phase of this.

[Music] If you'd like more definition in your sky and clouds than what we've achieved today, you can do it wet or dry.

This is a dry sample, just take titanium white on your fan brush and you're actually going to get more of a cloud shape, if you prefer that, more definition, more detail, just wipe your brush and dry brush it into the background to blend it away, pretty simple.

I've finished trimming out the truck so it's all protected, I can come in and freely just paint right over the background now, so safety first guys, make sure you put your cap back on your knife so you're not stabbing yourself when you're inadvertently reaching for a brush.

I'm going to take a pencil and I want to find my horizon line back here somewhere, because I'm going to put some base coat on the upper half of this canvas where the sky and the background is, but I'm not going to put it down here.

I want this to stay nice and dark later on so I'm not going to put any white base coat here like you think I normally would.

We are in oil zone now, we have changed over to oil paints from the acrylic, so I've gotten rid of all of my acrylic stuff, I washed out my acrylic brush.

For oil paints today we're going to be using cobalt blue, sat green, burnt sienna, cadmium yellow pale, ivory black, red rose deep, titanium white, I've got a bit of clear glazing medium here to put on the truck later on to help us blend the oil colors over that and to glaze it and I've got some white base coat here that I'm going to use for some nice blendability and softness in the sky.

For brushes I'm using a two inch scenery brush, a #10 flat brush, it's little brother the #6 flat brush which will be good for getting in areas here on the truck, a #6 round brush, a #3 fan brush, a 1 1/2 inch large texture brush which is going to be really nice for putting in this grass texture in the foreground and I have a couple of liners for detail work on the building and on the truck itself.

I have a #2 detail script liner and a #2 liner.

The liner is much finer; it comes to more of a pinpoint than the detail script liner.

Okay, I'm going to put in the sky, the sky is going to put in very simply, I'm going to leave it blotchy so there's some atmosphere and movement in it.

I'm going to start out with some of this white basecoat and literally going to scrub this into the canvas.

A lot of people make the mistake of trying to paint it on and puts it on too heavy.

Don't think you're painting yet, yes we are but really we're not, not in the conventional sense.

Scrub on a base coat.

I'm going to go right in that opening where the window is because I want the sky to show through that opening in the truck.

Notice I'm coming just down to the pencil line because I don't want to put white down there.

If you get a little bit of white over the edge there, if you get it down there, it's not going to ruin your painting by any stretch, but I find that I don't always put that basecoat everywhere just for the sake of doing it, a lot of places I don't need it, nor do I want it, so I usually just put it in the areas that require the softer blending, and I use it those areas and not everywhere else.

Put it on very thin and sparingly scrub it in.

I'm going to pick up some cobalt blue, work it into the brush evenly, you'll notice it as I work it in, it picks up the white that's left in the brush from the base coat.

Get a flavor that you like, get it as light or as dark as you want, but I want some darker accents in here once in a while so I'm going to go kind of darkish, work it in so there's no chunks on your brush, and when I come in to blend this, or to apply it rather before I blend it, I just kind of roll the brush around.

I'm leaving some bigger white areas that will be construed as clouds and some atmosphere which will give this some depth in the sky.

As I come lower I want to use a lighter touch, I've exhausted most of the blue off the brush and I'm picking up more of the white basecoat so it automatically gets a little lighter anyway, which is good.

But I want it to get farther away, it will look farther away at this horizon line if I keep the value overall lighter.

And see, just as easy as that we can plop a sky in there.

It looks pretty convincing doesn't it?

Rather than just painting solid flat blue, if you want a little extra punch in it, take a little more blue maybe in a couple spots deepen it.

See if you go with a darker blue it looks like you got a deeper hole in the sky, it looks farther away, but you want some variety in it.

That's looking pretty good, and just that easy we have a sky.

From there, I'm going to wipe my brush off on a rag and I want to just soften some of the texture and the brush strokes primarily out of that, so wipe your brush off thoroughly.

I don't need to wash the brush at this point, if I just wipe it off it's plenty clean enough for what I need to do.

I like to blend with just a big oval and I just kind of dust it all over and you'll see that it really softens all those coarse brush marks.

You might not be able to see those as well as I can, but up close here, I can really see them so those are what I'm trying to soften and eliminate.

Okay, that was pretty easy right?

I'm going to come in and put in this distant hillside; I'm going to use my #10 flat brush and I'm going to chisel this up with a mixture of sap green, I'll use some of this blue too that I've got on here, right into my sky blue.

I'll use green, blue, white; now, I want to tone that down a little bit and make it a little more of a natural foliage color of some sort, so I'll use a little bit of burnt sienna.

If it gets too brownish, you know you've put too much sienna.

I've got just a bit too much in there, so I'll balance it back by putting more green back into that.

It's like a teeter-totter, if it's heavy on one end, you throw some of the other color on the other end.

That's a little too greenish for my own personal tastes so I'm going to put a little bit of blue with it.

Some of you might have heard through the grapevine that blue is my all-time favorite color, so I want to get a color that I like.

Same for you, just get something that you like.

I'm going to go with something maybe about like that.

Again, just to recap, I've got white, blue, green, and burnt sienna in that mixture.

I'm going to chisel the brush up and notice that I didn't encapsulate the whole truck; I like to leave the truck open with the line going through the truck rather than have the mountain come above.

You don't get a sense of an overlap that way; this way, you will.

I'm going to bring this maybe coming up not trying to match that one exactly, it's probably going to come out kind of close, but I won't make this hill maybe as tall, just for the sake of being different.

It doesn't really matter.

I'm going to bring it down and come up this side like that, and from there, I'm just going to kind of fill it in.

If you don't like the shape, you can refine it as you do that; put a little extra bump and wiggle in it.

It's land, so it can be a lot of different profiles, just don't get anything that's too pointed like a pyramid.

You want it to look like a nice, soft, rolling hill.

I'm just going to fill this in down my pencil line, and again, if you get some paint down below the pencil line, it's not really going to be a dire situation, no biggie, I just don't need paint down there, so I'm just not painting down there.

See, it's a pretty simple process just to get that profile in there; it doesn't take much.

I need to put some highlighting, you can tell in this painting the light's coming from the right because you see more light on the truck on this side and you can tell be the cast shadow falling away from the truck behind it and the light on the building so we know the light's coming from this side.

You always want to be consistent with your light source and the direction of it.

I've wiped the brush off, I'm going to take titanium white and a little bit of the cadmium yellow, pale into that, and into some of the green that I've already got, something that's a little warmer and more yellow-green like a sunshine color.

Now the difference is, instead of going in with the bush this way, I like to hold it flat and it gives me a different take on it.

I can get a little bit more of a rougher texture, not as smooth as if I use the end of the brush, so I tilt the brush back like this and I kind of deposit it and that's not going to be quite light enough for you.

I can see it but it's probably not going to translate to camera well enough.

I'll lighten that up a little bit, and I just drag and pat, and so it gives you a rougher texture.

I'm going to lighten that even just a whisker more.

To lighten it, I'm just putting a little bit more white with it, and you have to kind of think of your hills -- if this one cuts in front, I can bring it in front just like this, just by how I add my highlights.

See how it gives it a lot of shape and form and dimension?

It's not just a flat, green profile on there anymore; now it's starting to look like an actual hill with roundness to it.

I'll put a little bit over on this side.

A lot of these landscape techniques like this are pretty straightforward and pretty simple to execute.

So you can kind of put these where you want them; I've still got to put the old barn back there, but this will give you the idea of how I achieve that.

This one's a little grayer, a little more blue underneath.

This one, I'm going a little bit more vivid and greener today.

That's fine, I'm using the same palette of colors that I discussed earlier, same ones I used for that, it's just all in how you mix them.

There's really not a right or wrong, you just want to get colors that you like.

Okay, from there, I'm going to start putting in my little cabin or my barn back there.

I don't want to have it dead center -- oh, I got to put my trees in, I'm almost getting ahead of myself here.

I've got to put my trees in first.

I'm going to take a little bit of this green that I had and maybe a little bit of white, a little more sienna; I just want a different flavor, a little touch of blue, slightly different flavor than what my actual mountain is, but I need it to be a slightly darker value than the mountain.

I'm going to take more green, more blue, a little more sienna and mixing it on my palette, I can't really tell.

You're going to have to literally come in and try it on your canvas and see what it looks like.

That looks pretty good.

I'm going to open up the corner on the brush and I'm just going to tap my way across, make it uneven.

These are in the distance, we don't have to have a lot of detail, a lot of fanfare with them and just kind of tap like this right down to my line.

Sometimes it's easier to just establish it on the line like that first and then fluff your trees out on the top.

You don't have to get too technical with them; they're in the distance, don't get too carried away.

You don't want to show a lot of detail, yet.

Come out the other side over here a little bit, as far as the barn goes.

I'm just going to draw in the basic shape with the brush.

Old barns, buildings in general like that are pretty easy because they're literally just a box with a triangle on the top.

We're bringing this tree up above the mountain a little bit which creates an overlap, pushes the mountain back a little farther.

Okay, I'm going to take my #6 round brush that I had before and I'm going to take some burnt sienna, a little touch of black, just a little speck of black to gray that down a little bit.

I'll use some of this white base coat since I've still got it on my palette, the titanium while would work.

You'll probably want to thin it down a little bit, and whether your barn is kind of brownish or grayish, again, get a color that you like.

I know I keep saying that, but it's true.

Everybody's color preferences are totally different, get something that you like.

Now on the front of this barn, I'm going to come in like this and I've got to make sure that's going to show up.

If it doesn't, I've got to change the value.

I'm going to make that a little bit lighter until it starts to show up against my background.

I'm just going to draw in a basic box shape; this will be the front of the building, just a basic box.

I'll put a little bit of a triangle on top.

When you're painting at home, you'll have all kinds of time to embellish this and make sure all your lines are nice and straight, I just want to show you the technique of how to do it.

It probably wouldn't hurt if it was a little bit lighter yet.

There we go, that's better; I just put a little more white with it.

I want that to show up.

Now on the back side of this to the left, it's going to be in shadow, so I want a darker value there.

Value just simply means how light or dark a color is, so if I take this color that I've got and I build on it, I can tell how far I've come.

I know I've got to add more sienna, a bit more black, and I'm going to try that and see what I get.

I'm going to angle this downhill slightly so it looks like it's turned away from us.

The linear perspective says that things tend to angle down towards the horizon line, so I'm going to let this angle down right on the roofline part of it.

The bottom, I don't need to worry about, because the bottom will be taken care of.

We're going to just chop that right off when we put the grass in front, so we don't have to worry about the bottoms of these at all, any of these sections of the barn.

Okay, from there I need to cook up some sort of a roof color, I'm going to say green.

Just get a different green than what you've got in the background so it shows up.

If your paint's a little thick, you can put a little bit of this clear glazing medium with it or a little bit of paint thinner, and I'm going to roll the brush to a point and just carefully kind of sketch on a roof.

The roof is a parallelogram, which means that the front and back angles of the roof are parallel to each other, and the top and bottom, so make sure that you're paying attention to your perspective.

Okay, and I'll put a little sense of the lip of the roof on this side.

We've got an old barn sitting back there.

I'm going to take my liner brush, I'll actually take my detail script liner and I'll take black and a little bit of white; I don't want it quite as stark as just pure black.

I'm going to take a little bit of thinner on this brush and I'll flatten it out on two sides like this, like a little chisel, and the doors and windows can go anywhere you choose, it's totally up to you.

I'm making this up, it's not like I'm painting a barn that I know, and just put your windows in.

If you want a bigger door like something that looks like they could drive this little truck into it; maybe back in the day, they stored this old truck in this barn, who knows?

It tells a little more of a story that way, right?

So you just put the doors and windows in wherever you think you might want them.

Make sure you square them off a little bit; like I said, take your time.

Okay, that brings us to the conclusion of this episode.

Join me next time as we finish Out to Pasture.

We'll develop the background grass and the truck itself.

Until next time, stay creative and keep painting.

All 13 episodes of Painting with Wilson Bickford Series 2 are now available on DVD in one box set for $35 plus $4.95 shipping and handling.

Wilson Bickford's rose painting techniques DVD gives you in-depth lessons and a variety of techniques used in painting roses, stems, and leaves.

Wilson Bickford's landscape techniques DVD shows you a variety of techniques used in painting skies, trees, water, and grasses.

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