Wilson Bickford: Last time we prepped the old truck and put in the background.

This we are going to finish off the foreground and developed the old truck.

So join me next as we go "Out to Pasture."

[Music] [Music] Welcome back, thanks for joining me again today.

As you recall, last week we started the "Out to Pasture" project with the old truck.

We masked the truck out after we under painted it with some acrylic and now after having dropped in the background with oils, we are going to move forward and put the grass in and develop the truck itself.

I didn't put any medium down here on the lower half of the canvas, I want that dry so the colors that I apply there will stay true and stay nice and dark.

So that area of the canvas is dry.

I'm going to use my inch and a half large texture brush and I'm going to start in by basing in a darker tone for the grass and then we'll build up to a lighter highlight on it.

So I'm going to start out with uh, I've been working on the same puddle from the previous portion and I'm going to take sap-green, cobalt blue, little touch of the ivory black and you will notice I'm really tapping the brush open.

Quite a bit of paint and you'll notice my bristles are spread open.

And just as I'm tapping on the pallet like this, I'm going to apply it to the canvas the same way.

Now this is going to look really dark.

We are going to build up to a lighter highlight over the top of this.

So I definitely want to separate that landline from the trees back there.

And this also where I'm going to cut off the bottom of the barn and shove that back over the hill a little bit.

And see my color because it's going on dry canvas it's not picking up a white base coat like I sometimes have down there and it's staying nice and dark.

I want to start out with a nice dark tone and I'm going to build up to a highlight.

Now this goes on a little harder because the canvas is dry but it yields a nice texture in the end when we're done.

The canvas won't be as wet so I can get more texture actually within the grass and if I get too many layers of paint on there.

So you'll see that I'm just kind of stabbing that on there more or less.

If you look closely you can actually see texture in it from this brush.

This brush works great for what it's designed for.

It's made for doing rough textures like grass and you can also do trees and bushes with it.

So basically I just need to fill in this whole area, I'm going to come back and start building up.

I'm just mixing more paint as I'm going here.

You'll see that I'm running out quite frequently.

It takes a fair amount of paint to cover this area.

I'm going to come back with a lighter highlight color and start building that up.

Eventually we need to come in and put a shadow, a cast shadow from the side of the truck to the right.

And then we can pull the tape off of that truck and start developing it.

The truck itself is about ninety percent done at this point, we're just going to add a few extra highlights and shadows and embellish it a little bit.

Okay.

I want to get that filled in and get all the little white flecks of canvas hidden.

Okay, from there I'm going to wipe the brush off.

I'm going to come back with a much lighter tone.

So I'm going to wipe that off and I'm going to take white and yellow.

This is cadmium yellow pale.

Again I'm loading the brush the same way, bouncing the bristles open with a fair amount of paint, if I come in and just kind of that same little dabbing and stabbing motion.

You will notice that it gets darker as it comes away from the center of the canvas.

So I control that by not reloading the brush.

Once I start getting out into here I don't' reload the brush again, I let the brush literally run out of paint, and just kind of stay darker.

I'm going to end up spattering some flowers in here which actually takes up some of this dark so it doesn't look so stark as well.

It gives it a little detail, a little extra color.

See how it makes the grass look like it's got a contour to it and it's got some shape and some depth with that.

I'm going over the old truck just like it's not even there.

Don't try to paint around it, that's why we took the time to tape it out.

We don't have to paint around it.

And because I want to get some shading underneath the truck you got a little bit of light here in front of the truck so the shadow underneath will actually show.

So I'm going to make sure to put a little bit of light around that truck, just enough so that shadow, the cast out will show later.

That cast shadow means a lot.

It literally anchors the truck to the metal.

Okay now I'm just letting it fade away.

I still want to go a little lighter back here.

Sometimes to do that it's better to use a fan brush because it's a little smaller and get more accuracy with it I guess I would say where I want to go with that.

I'm going to take some white and yellow again, I'm lightening the color even a little more so.

But I use this brush in the same manner as I did the texture brush.

Notice I've got a fair amount of paint and I'm opening the bristles up.

You'll see if I come up like this it gives us a lot more definition against that background mountain area.

It's also going to create a nice light area behind the dark truck which has to do with contrast.

You always need to think of contrast, light against dark, so everything stands out from everything else.

So you can build that up as much as need be, it's relative to how dark your background colors are.

So you are going to have to adjust it on your own canvas just like I'm doing here.

There is no easy way out and quick way out when it comes to this.

You just have to use what you've got and build off that and get the correct relationships between the lights and the darks.

I'm going to even one step lighter.

I'm going to take more white and yellow and I really want this area right in here to glow, really stand out.

It's really going to make that truck come forward.

You'll see when I take the tape off.

But again, don't just put lines on there, you got to bleed everything in and let it just kind of slowly dissolve into everything else and disappear.

So it's just a nice soft glow and not just lines within the land area.

Okay, I'm going to wipe this off and then I'm going to wash it.

I've got a pail of odorless mineral spirits here, I'm just going to swish that brush out.

Put the lid right back on.

And I'm going to spatter some different little wild-flower textures and colors in there.

On this one I used some white and then some pinks with the red rose deep and white.

You can you any colors you want.

You can put some bluish flowers, some yellowish flowers, it's all good, just use colors that you like, if something looks good to you.

I see a little bit of a hard line here that's catching my eye more than I want it to so I'm going to soften that out a little bit with my clean fan which means that I've got to wash that again really quickly.

I want to take care of that before I left it.

Okay, I'm going to take some this white base coat and I'm going to start with a little bit of lighter pink, maybe like this, and you'll have to thin this down, this is spatter.

If you've painted with me before you've seen how this is done.

It's a very handy technique to know, you can use it for falling snowflakes, you can use it for stars in the sky, gravel in the road or flowers in the meadow just like we are doing here.

The idea is to pull the bristles back, let them snap forward and spray those little speckles on your canvas.

See in the context of where I use it is what it looks like.

Right there it looks like flowers, if you used white and you were doing it in a night time sky, it looks like stars in your sky.

So see I'm just going to embellish that a little bit, it adds so much to your painting and it's really technique to do.

Just got to control it, don't let it spritz all over, don't have your brush angled up so it goes all over, I've got it targeted right where I want it, angle your brush down.

I want to use a couple different values of that, so I'm going to add more red and darken it.

So the darker ones look like they are more in the shadow and the lighter ones will look like they are more on the surface and catching more sunlight.

So it's good to do more than one color, one value at least.

I'm going to put some darker reds in there too.

Okay, it's looking pretty good.

If I really wanted to build it up I could put some white ones in there like this one I did, put a few white.

Before I put the white ones in because I want to put some of them up around the truck, I'm going to come back and put that cash shadow underneath the truck.

So I rinse my fan out.

Now right here you are going to have to be very conscious of where the bottom of your truck is, where the tires are.

Now there are going to be kind of buried in and I'm going to bury those in later, but you need to know where that bottom level is because what I'm doing is just putting a dark shadow underneath that truck right there and off to the side of it.

I need a darker cooler green for that.

I can take some of this green that I had previously, add a little blue to it and darken it down.

I want a bluish-green, a cooler green, shadow green.

Notice the stuff that's in the light is warmer, more yellow in it, warmer color.

I take blue, green, maybe a speck of black, tap the bush because it's a shadow on grass but I want texture in it.

Just because it's a shadow doesn't mean that it's smooth.

It would be if it's on a concrete driveway, it would be more smooth, but on grass it's going to rough just like the grass itself.

Okay I can actually just discern the edge of my bumper right there.

So I need to bring this out just enough and as it comes out the side I'm going to let it just kind of slowly disappear, which means that I just tap a little lighter on the perimeter and let it melt into the greens that are there.

If it was on a hard surface, like I said a concrete driveway, you'd have a much harder profile on that shadow, a harder contour.

Since it's on grass it's going to be a little bit softer.

Okay, now see that will look better, it will look more on the context when I take the tape off.

Okay I'm going to wipe that and rinse the brush out and complete my spatter.

I want the spatter over the top of that shadow.

So I'm going to take a little bit of white, now this is still some of the white base coat.

Make sure it's thinned down just enough so it's going to release off the brush.

And I'm going to enhance this by putting a few little lighter accents in here.

Don't be afraid to get it up close to the shadow, and a few of them may be right in that shadow a little bit just to anchor that shadow down.

Okay.

Now I had a little bit of a faux pas there which is good to show you.

It's good to know this.

You'll notice I've got one little fleck of white here from the spatter on the barn.

Just take a dry brush, now this is still wet, if yours happens to be dry at this stage and you started ahead of me and this is dried out, it will whisk right off.

Likewise, if it's wet like it is now it will just blend in.

No problem.

Okay, drumroll please.

I'm going to use the knife, and I've the little sharp knife I had last week that I trimmed the truck out with, or that would work or if you have a painting knife handy, anything to get underneath the tape.

I'm going to remove all of the tape.

And this is where all of our hard work pays off.

Carefully remove all of the tape and the under painted truck is still hiding in here.

There it is.

Sometimes it takes a couple minutes to get this off.

I think we've got her on the run now.

A couple little pieces here I still got to get.

If you smudge it and get it on your truck, the beauty of it is its dry and you just wipe off the excess paint and smear it around.

One little piece here on the bumper that is fighting me.

Okay, when I get this tape all off I'm going to apply a thin coat of clear glazing medium to the whole truck which will make it easier to blend my oil glazes on top.

Like I said before in the first show, we want to put a little bit more of a rusty tone on there with some burnt sienna that makes it easier to flow on there.

So I'm going to hop off here just for a second and I'm going to take some clear glazing medium with my number six flat brush.

I'm going to scrub on a thin coat over the whole truck area.

I'll be right back.

[Music] Depending on the make and model, the common color for these old vehicles were reds and greens.

If you take a little bit of emerald green and you want to show some of the original paint color on this old girl, you can add a few touches here and there and it looks like it hasn't all gone to rust but we've got some of the original color still showing.

I've applied a very thin layer of clear glazing medium to the whole truck area.

Now if you find any discrepancies around the truck where you didn't quite trim exactly to the line, mine looks pretty good, I got lucky on this one.

But sometimes you'll see little flecks where it didn't quite fill in, you cut a little bit beyond the line.

I've gone one very small minor one right here where's there's white canvas where I cut outside my line a little bit.

I'm just taking a clean dry number two detail script liner and using the grass color that's around it just to pull it in to tighten up the edges so it doesn't look like I missed even though I did in a couple very minor spots here.

But it's easy to fix.

Just pull the color in where it needs to go.

And I'm going to start embellishing this truck.

Now you'll notice I've got some rusty tones on there, so with that in mind if I take my number six flat brush and a little bit of the clear glazing medium and a little touch of the burnt sienna.

I get this really rusty color which just immediately makes that look like its decades old.

Look at the rust on this old girl.

And I don't necessarily put it everywhere, and I will come back and actually add some highlights on top of this.

Notice how little pain I'm using.

I don't have much at all.

My brush it's almost like a dry brush technique because the truck itself is already wet with the clear medium so I don't need much medium or paint on the brush to get this to spread around.

If you get it in a spot where you don't want it like on the blue of the bumper or on the chrome, just wipe it off with a towel, it's no big deal.

See I want to make this look old so sometimes I put it on a little thicker and a little heavier in a couple of spots so it really looks corroded and rusty.

And I'll show you here in just a second, I'll use a different brush and I'll put it on a little heavier in a couple spots.

It doesn't take much, this starts looking really good right off the bat.

We had that truck ninety percent finished with the under-painting.

That's why I say when you are doing our under-painting stage it's worth it to take the time to do a good job on it.

What you see is what you are going to get.

We are simply embellishing it here now and enhancing it but the main work is in that under-painting.

If the under-painting looks bad, this stage is going to look bad.

It's that simple, so it's a good idea to take your time.

And if I switch over and take a number six round brush, this one is a little bit easier to get in where I need to do it.

And I take a little bit more sienna, this time I'm taking a little bit more paint and a little bit drier.

I didn't put any medium with it.

And I tap it on the brush on the side and when I come up to the canvas I just put it on a little heavier.

You can actually see where it looks like rusty, old corrosion and it looks rough.

I'm putting a texture on it which looks really, really nice on this old truck.

Like I said before, my wife is a photographer and she and I like to ride around in the evenings and look for old barns and anything of interest that I might want to paint.

She likes taking photos just for the sake of taking photos anyway.

So it works out great.

And every now and then I see something that really catches my eye and we pull over and I say get me a shot of that.

So there is a lot of old barns and a lot of these old trucks and stuff in the area where I live here in Northern New York.

I'm always on the lookout for stuff that's just interesting to me, makes good subject matter for paintings.

See how that's getting rustier as I'm doing this?

I'm just dabbing on more of a dry brush approach and see how that's really making that look old.

I'm adding corrosion.

I'm not doing it everywhere.

Okay, that's looking pretty good.

I'm going to swoosh this brush out, I want to get more of a sense of light on the actual truck.

So I want to go a little bit lighter, maybe a little bit warmer with the color.

So if I take some titanium white, some of this burnt sienna that I've got, even with the glaze in it, that's fine.

But some of this burnt sienna, a little bit of yellow, I'm just making a lighter, more yellowy, slightly orangish color.

And this is opaque now because I've got the white with it.

So wherever I put it, it's going to easily cover what's underneath.

Let's see I can do it down the rim of this doorway where the window is.

Now like we said before, the light is coming from this way so anywhere on this side is fair game, or any angles on that hood or the fender that happened to be facing in that direction are fair game.

So you want to look at it logically.

You know you are probably going to find old photos of your own to use.

So this will give you the idea of how to approach it no matter what the vehicle is and whatever photo you are working from.

You want to stay consistent with your light source, make sure that all your lights are coming from the same direction.

We only have one big light source on this planet and it's the sun.

So if you are doing landscapes you've got to be consistent with your light source.

A lot of times beginners get confused and they just have their light and shadows every which way.

And you will know in a heartbeat if you do that, you will see it.

It doesn't make sense.

See right around the corner of this hood I'm suggesting that roundness and I'm going to come back and soften this momentarily.

It looks a little harsh still.

See I'm describing the curvature of that hood, I wiped the brush off and the background is wet now with the glaze and that sienna so it makes it very easy to blend into.

Let's see if I just hold the brush kind of flatly, just blend it, suggest the curve of the hood.

Probably if the light is coming from here there would be a little bit on the top roof here I would imagine.

So I just do it for what looks logical.

Now if I have an actual photo that I'm working from it's all spelled out for me right there.

I can kind of see what's going on and I just duplicate what's in the photo, and that's the easier way to do it.

This one I'm kind of dreaming up as I go, this will more than give you the idea of how I handle it, it's pretty easy actually.

Alright, that old truck looks like it's going to say Ahooga any minute, doesn't it?

One of those old clackson horns.

Alright, that's looking pretty good.

I think I want just a little more light right on this fender just to really set that off.

This is the fun part, just embellishing it and adding all the little details and the lights and darks.

Notice I've got a little bit of rust on the bumper too.

So if I go back to some of the sienna that I had and just, I want to dry bush it more or less so it looks rough, you'll see that if I hold the brush kind of flat it skates over and picks up the tooth of the canvas and the bumps so it's not filling it in solidly.

It looks very rough, just like rust.

Pretty easy.

Maybe I'll put a little bit on the chrome here around the radiator and around those light sockets.

All of that starting to rust after all this time sitting out here.

This old girl served her useful purpose in life and she's off the road now and retired and out to pasture.

If you look carefully you'll see there is a little bit of detail in that radiator.

You know everybody knows what a radiator looks like.

You have that honey-comb effect there.

It's pretty easy to get on this to a certain degree because of the weave of the canvas, the tooth of the canvas.

I'm going to let that do that job for me.

I don't want to go too light with it.

This it turned away from the light source and it's in shadow more or less.

But if I take white and a little bit of black and I want kind of a dark gray but light enough to show up against this dark on the radiator itself.

And I'm going to kind of pat this on here, so see I'm going to take a color like this on my round brush, I'm going to flatten it out on two sides, even though it's a round brush I'm kind of essentially turning it into a flat.

So it's flat on one side.

And if I come in like this and hold it very flat like this and I just touch and tap, it's hard to see unless you are close up.

You will see that it rides on the bumps of the weaves of the canvas, so it's a broken look it's not filled in solid.

It looks like it has a texture in it.

And instead of just that being a flat black area with nothing going on, now it looks like you've got some texture in that old radiator a little bit.

If it's too harsh you can wipe the brush off and come back and just tap it a little more.

Don't tap it to the point that it's filling in all of the nooks and crannies and the weaves of the canvas.

We are letting that texture and tooth of the canvas do the work for us.

Alright, that's looking pretty good.

I'm going to switch over and take my detail script liner and I'm going say there is a couple patches on here on that chrome where it's still nice and shiny.

If I take some of this white base coat, I want a nice glare.

Maybe on the upper half of this little light socket on the headlight right here on this side, and I can put a little touch and brighten this around the edge of that.

Maybe a little bit right on the top of the bumper.

Give it a little glare, a little bit of shine still left in it.

Alright, that's looking pretty good.

I'm so glad you joined me today.

I love painting these old vehicles.

And this was a hoot bringing this to you.

I hope you enjoyed it.

And try out your own send me a photo of what you've done.

I've love to see it.

Thanks for joining me.

Until next time, stay creative and keep painting.

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