- In days gone by folks would have to venture out to the old well pump to get a pail of water.

Today's generation probably hasn't had to experience that.

Do you remember when?

I do.

Join me next on Painting with Wilson Bickford as we relive that memory.

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

I'm Wilson Bickford and I'm gonna share a nice little country scene with you today.

In the area I live there's a lot of these old hand well pumps that are still in existence.

I go out and I take photos of them, of old barns, old trucks, these old pumps, anything and everything that is of interest to me.

This is a nice nostalgic theme and I hope you enjoy it.

It's called Remember When.

If you go to the WPBS TV website, you will be able to download a supply list like this that runs down the oil colors and the brushes and whatnot that we're using.

There's also a sketch in there if you choose to use it.

This one's got a little paint on it.

There's a sketch in there that you can use to transfer these images onto your canvas.

Or you're more than welcome to freehand your own obviously or use your own design.

But this will help you along if you are one of those people who feel that you can't draw, or don't simply wanna take the time to draw.

What I did was take my paper, I put graphite paper underneath it, and then with a red pen on top, the red pen shows your ink lines, so you can see where you've been and track your progress.

I traced those images onto the canvas.

From there I have taken some tape, just regular masking tape, applied a piece of tape over everything, masked them out and trimmed around them.

The difference is this particular portion right here with the pump, I did paint with black acrylic gesso.

That was painted first with black acrylic.

I allowed it to dry completely and then I taped it out just like I did the house and the pail.

I also put a border on here and this handle goes underneath that tape on the border so that will give me a 3D effect and bring that out of the border at the end, which is a nice look.

Make sure your tape is pressed down all the way around all these edges very firmly.

This way I don't have to paint around the house or the pail or the pump, I can just drop my background in over the top, it makes it very simple.

Paint smart not hard, that's my motto.

Anything I can do to make it easier and simpler, that's what I do.

For oil paints today we are going to be using cerulean blue, ultramarine blue, cadmium yellow pale, burnt sienna, ivory black, titanium white, and I have a little bit of a white base coat here.

For brushes I'm using a two inch scenery brush, a number three fan brush, a one inch texture brush, a number two detailed scriptliner, a number two liner, and I have a number six round brush here that I may or may not use.

It's optional.

It kind of comes in handy in a couple spots, you may choose to use it.

I may not but I'll show you what it's for.

Okay, we'll get started on this.

I'm going to take my two inch scenery brush with some of the white base coat.

I'm gonna wet down the background sky and tree area.

Before I do that, I wanna keep this area up here primarily dry 'cause I wanna go darker with it later, so I'm going to use even more tape.

I know you guys are thinking, man, this guy goes nuts on that tape, but it makes my life easy.

I'm gonna tape off my land line.

Now see I've got an indication of it there where I can see it.

If I just press this down, we'll tape that off right up to the bottom of the house.

And see I could trim it and put a nice curve on it, I really don't need to get that technical with it.

I'm just gonna stick it down like this, and I can kind of bend it and twist the tape, and kinda make it conform to where I wanna go.

It'd be easier if I had it hooked into my easel here a little more firmly.

There we go.

I was pressing down on it quite hard right there.

So this is just a little buffer.

It's like putting a bib on when you go to the fancy Italian restaurant and eat spaghetti.

This keeps the sauce off your shirt.

I don't wanna get this color down in here where the meadow is so that just protects it.

Okay, I'm gonna take the two inch scenery brush with a little bit of this white base coat.

I'm gonna scrub it in very very thinly.

See, I can paint right over the pump and the house, I don't have to worry about it.

It makes my life easy.

I like easy.

Life is complicated enough as it is, you don't wanna make your artistic life complicated too.

Anything I can do to make things easier, by golly I'm all for it.

Scrub it in very thinly.

I'm gonna use some cerulean blue on the lower portion of the sky.

And some ultramarine at the top, which will grade the sky and give me a nice depth to my sky.

I'm thinking aerial perspective.

You want it lighter the lower it is on the horizon, and darker up above.

So I'm gonna take the dirty brush with the white that's left in it and a little bit of this cerulean blue.

If it's too dark, too strong, put a little more white back with it.

It's all good.

Get a value and a color that you like.

Work it in evenly so there's no chunks or streaks on your brush.

And right across this lower portion.

I'm not too fanatical about getting right down to my line 'cause I know my trees are gonna go there.

You can paint it right down to the tape, that's fine.

I'm just being lazy, I don't put paint where I don't need to.

I'm gonna brush this in, feather it away at the top.

If I feather it back so it just comes back to white.

See, I'm losing blue off the brush, it's picking up more of the white.

And I use a lighter touch so it just kinda trails off.

If I don't leave a real hard edge there, it makes it easier to marry the ultramarine blue into it.

Okay, from there I am gonna pick up some of the ultramarine.

I can mix it right nextdoor or right onto this spot of blue.

It's fine.

I wanna save some room on my palette because I have a lot of mixing to do on this scene here or this project.

This is gonna be a two-part project.

This is part one.

I could breeze through this and get it done just for the sake of doing it, but I wouldn't be able to slow down and actually teach.

The reason you're tuned in is you wanna learn how to do this.

This is a teaching format, so I don't wanna rush through it and just paint it just to say look what I can do.

I wanna slow down and be able to teach it and show you how you can do it.

Okay, I'm gonna go across the top like this.

I'm making sure I get right out onto that taped border.

And then I'm gonna start doing a crisscross like this that will feather them together.

Hey that rhymed, maybe I'll set that to music.

It sounds like it song.

It could be a hit, feather together.

But you wanna bring those together seamlessly so you don't have a hard line here.

It'll look like a dark blue curtain hanging in front of a light blue wall.

You don't want any division there.

So take your time with the blending.

I'm going a little faster here than I normally would, but I've got a clock counting down over here keeping me straight, keeping me honest.

So you'll have a lot of time at home to tinker.

But see I'm just gonna do broad crisscrosses like this just to melt those together.

Then I'm gonna use my fan brush to fluff in some clouds.

I've got a number three fan brush here.

If I take some white, little bit of that base coat since I've got it out there.

It'll thin it down a little bit, and make it a little easier to stick to my canvas.

And we use quite a bit of paint, notice I load the brush up quite generously.

And I'm just going to use the corner of the brush to kinda tap in some little billows and rounded shapes.

I'm thinking big puffy cumulus summery clouds.

It's winter here right now as we're filming this, and I'm counting down the days to summer.

We like to go camping and get out in the outdoors.

We get out in the outdoors in the wintertime too.

We like to snowshoe and go out and take photos.

But we're counting down the days to summer right now.

Okay, I wiped the brush off, I'm just adding more clouds.

And just put them wherever you think you want them.

It's all good.

There's no right or wrong.

Notice I am fading away the bottom of the cloud shapes, which kinds helps anchor them to the sky.

They look connected that way rather than to have a hard edge on the bottom and they look like they're cut out and stuck on.

If you soften the bottom edge it really makes them look like they're connected to your sky.

You'll wanna wipe your brush off.

And if I use the back side, I can just lightly pat, and knock some of the brush marks and the texture out of it.

Now Van Gogh would of left all those brush marks.

Da Vinci would of blended them all out.

So it's totally up to you, it's a personal preference.

And see if I wipe the brush off, see how this edge is really hard and round.

See how this one's not, it's kind of wispy.

Watch this, this is pretty cool.

Wipe your brush right off thoroughly and if I use just the end where all those little minute little bristle tips are.

So you've got a lot of surface area there.

If I just lightly do little circles like this and just kind of pull that out against that blue sky, I can reshape it but I can also soften it.

See how it's not quite so round looking now?

I took some of the obvious round shape out of it, it doesn't look like a ball.

I'm just kind of pulling that paint out and reshaping it.

And it makes it look a little more wispy.

I call that wispifying.

That's one of my words I made up.

It's in the Willie dictionary, look it up.

So anywhere you wanna do that, that's fair game too.

You can soften those out.

See it looks a little wind blown like the wind went woosh?

Okay, we're gonna move on to these trees behind the house.

I don't have a green on my palette so I'm gonna mix one up.

I'm gonna use the one inch texture brush, and I'm gonna start with ultramarine blue.

I'm gonna save this puddle here for mixing later 'cause I'm gonna do some of my house colors there.

So I'm gonna skip over here.

I could have used that but then I would have to backtrack and find some of that color later.

So I'm gonna start fresh.

I'm gonna take ultramarine blue, little bit of yellow.

And see right out of the gate automatically I get green, which is good, that's what I'm shooting for.

I want it kind of on a bluish green tone because the blue green kind of is a cooler green for shadows.

I would use the warmer green where the sunlight is hitting the leaves.

So we'll use yellow for the warmer green later.

But I want this quite dark, and I want it kind of on the bluish side of green.

We're mixing a secondary color from two primaries, yellow and blue.

So it can lean yellow-green or blue-green, it's like a teeter-totter.

I definitely want something bluish green.

I'm gonna try this and see what I think.

I'll put some right here.

I think that's gonna work.

I just need a little more paint overall.

I wanna leave a little more texture than that.

Notice as I'm loading the brush and mixing, I'm tapping.

Don't mix your paint like this with this brush or swirl it to blend it all together 'cause it just takes that brush from being loose like this and just mats it together like a club.

You want it very loose and open like this.

So you'll notice when I grab a gob of paint out of these puddles I'm just tapping.

I haven't done anything other than tapping, and it keeps the bristles really loose and spread open.

That's how I get this nice leaf look.

All right, that's gonna work for me.

This one looks a little greener, it just means I had more yellow in it.

I am gonna put the yellowy highlights on the top.

I'm kind of liking that blue-green today just for something different.

Get a color you like, that's the important part.

I just want a nice pleasing silhouette here, some sort of shape.

I do wanna carve out and leave the end of the pump, the nozzle kind of, the spout I guess I would say, it's not the nozzle.

Leave the spout hanging out.

It's another song, the spout hanging out.

I'm writing music here today.

So I'm just gonna be conscious of the shape that I get.

And notice how I turn the brush left and right, it rounds the tree off.

And I'm just gonna go right above the house here a little bit.

I can see where my tape is, probably some of you at home are losing sight of that a little bit.

It's probably getting harder to see as I pile the paint on there but I can still see it enough to know where it is.

So I'm working around that.

I'm gonna dip down below the spout here a little bit.

Back up the other side.

They're trees so you have so many options here.

There's no right or wrong with this, you just want something that looks natural.

So you just want some unevenness to it, don't make them all the same and you can't go wrong.

I'm gonna bring this right tight down to that tape where the land line is.

I want a nice very solid connection there.

And see like I said, this one's much more blue, this one's much more green.

I had more yellow.

I'm not looking at the light yellow-green, I'm looking at that dark green within.

But see that's more of a yellow-green where this one's more of a blue-green.

This one just has more yellow in it.

Today I'm going more on the side of blue.

It's all good.

Get a color that you like.

I'm using the same exact colors, I'm doing the same thing.

Every time you paint, something different is gonna come out at you.

You're gonna paint the way you feel it right then.

Right now I'm kinda liking that blue-green.

So I'll leave it.

I could change it, no need to.

(happy instrumental music) People always ask me where I get the ideas for my paintings.

I take a camera with me everywhere I go, whether I'm just going for a walk or I'm driving to a class.

This pump is a photo that I took from a woman's house that lives just literally down the road from me.

This is in her front yard.

I'm not sure if the pump is even still functional, but it was out there and I saw it, it captured my interest, and I took a photo of it.

This is another one I took recently within the last couple of weeks.

I was driving along and I happened to see this old pump, so I stopped and took a photo.

Your camera will be your best friend.

It's always good for getting more reference material, so take it with you.

I'm gonna wipe that brush off very thoroughly, and I'm gonna come back with white and yellow into the same dirty brush.

I can even put a little bit of this cerulean blue with it.

I'm thinking a light yellowy leaves in sunlight green type of green.

I'm loading the brush the same way.

I won't know how this reads until I put it right against that same color.

And just before I do that, I'm gonna take my liner brush, and I'm just gonna use the handle.

And you'll notice that there are some indications of some tree trunks and whatnot back here.

If I just randomly scratch those out, you're gonna pick up a nice little glob of paint on the tip of your brush, so.

I always put a few more of these than I think I ultimately want because I know I'm gonna lose a lot of them in the highlights, which is fine.

Just don't space them too evenly, do them to perfectly.

Then if I come back to this brush, I can put my highlights on.

Again, the brush is really open.

And see, that's showing.

I want it to show a little brighter, so I'll probably come back and re-highlight.

Now that I got this color going I'll use it, but I'll probably come back and put something a little bit lighter and brighter too just for the sake of it.

We'll pour the sunshine on.

Like I said, there's a lot of old farms and old farmhouses and tractors and these pumps and you name it up where I live and they're still out there.

Some of them are being used, some aren't, but it gives me a wealth of reference material to work with.

I'm gonna take a little more white and yellow and I'm just gonna brighten that up a little more.

Now see if I mix it right next door to that color, I can tell how far I've come with it.

And I just wanna get a little brighter accent here and there on some of these trees.

Don't do it everywhere.

Too much of anything is a bad thing.

And that goes for highlighting in a painting too.

All right, I think that's looking pretty good.

That'll give you the idea of how I accomplished it at least.

All right, I can live with that, how about you?

It's looking pretty good, isn't it?

Okay, I'm gonna take my little sharp knife that I use to do my trimming with.

This isn't on the supply list, but your painting knife, if you happen to have a painting knife there would work.

It's probably safer.

But either or.

I'm gonna dig under the tape where the house is if I can find it, I know its on here somewhere.

There we go.

Found it.

And there should be a little house right under there.

Look at that, there it is right where I left it.

Who knew?

Okay, we're gonna paint the house in.

I'm gonna use the detailed scriptliner.

And notice it's white on the front, shadowed on the left-hand side, and the light's coming from this direction.

Detailed scriptliner, I'm gonna take white.

It looks like my liner is a little dirty, so I'll make sure I switch that out again.

Take a little bit of this white base coat, it's already thin.

The thick white will work, you just have to thin it down a lot more to get it to work for ya.

I'm carefully gonna paint in this front side of the house.

Be careful of that green on that tape down there, don't drag that up in there.

I'm actually painting around the windows.

And I'm not doing that dark eave up there, we're underneath.

On this side, it's gonna be more of shadow tone.

Remember earlier I said I was gonna leave that for later.

I mixed my green off that spot.

It's already half way to what I had to have, so I just left that for seed.

I'm gonna take some of that blue, which was my sky color basically, with the white on my brush and just a speck of the black.

I wanna gray it down a little bit.

I'm thinking a blue-gray for a shadow for something white.

I'm gonna try that.

That looks pretty good, let's see how it reads up here.

Hm, not too bad.

I'm gonna go just a hair grayer.

Just a touch more, a speck of black.

And this side of the house is gonna be painted with this color so it looks shadowy.

Again, I'm kinda painting around the windows.

I'll probably infringe on them a little bit.

That's okay, I'll clean them up when I paint them in.

No big deal.

Painting is nothing more than a series of adjustments.

You're tweaking this, adding that.

And if you make a boo-boo, you fix it.

It's no big deal.

While I've got this color going, notice there's a shadow on the face of this part of the house on the front, on the white where that overhang of the roof is creating a cast shadow.

I'm gonna use the same color right here.

It's not the dark black eave up above it, it's the shadow below that right on the face of the house.

Something like that.

Shadows mean everything, shadows are what give you depth.

It's these little things like this that a lot of people overlook.

You always wanna be conscious of your shadows.

Okay, now I'm gonna put in the windows.

I'm gonna do the windows in some sort of bluish tone.

I'm gonna take some of this what I call garbage on my palette.

It's all the same stuff I've been using.

I'm just gonna put a little more cerulean blue in that just to liven it up a little bit.

I wanna put the windows in with kind of a bluish tone, so it looks like you've got the blue sky reflecting into the glass windows.

If I were to paint them just black, they're just gonna look like an open hole.

I don't wanna do that.

Now see you'll have a lot of time at home to really square these up and do a good job with them.

So when you get ready to do your windows, do them justice.

I'm gonna put one here.

It's not gonna show up really well in that shadow so much, but I'm gonna add a darker tone into it eventually.

Same color over here, I'm gonna go a little of that lighter blue.

And I'll put some dark tone into it as well.

Now they don't show up very well right now, but they will, I'm gonna darken those down.

Into the color I just used, I'm gonna take a speck more of black, and dredge it into some of this blue.

I want something a little darker, grayer.

Just notice how that gives the windows a little more contrast but also a little more life.

I see some dark in there, I see some lighter blue in there.

It just breaks everything up.

This side over here, because it's darker around it anyway, I might have to go just a tad darker with a little more black just to get them to show up.

No big deal.

Now a lot of times I will get colors on like this and then I step back and analyze it after the fact.

And I might need to lighten this, darken that.

It's all about adjustments.

So see I might darken these windows down a little later, but I wanna get this house finished in this episode just to show you.

I'm gonna cook up something greenish for the roof.

I'm gonna go quite dark green but something different than what my trees are in the background, so they don't compete with each other.

So this was my tree green.

If I add more yellow to that, see how it kinda makes a different green?

I can put a little bit of cerulean with that even, just something that's gonna read differently.

I'm gonna go with maybe something like this.

This one's really really super dark and I know that.

I'm gonna try this green and see what I think.

It's just a different flavor.

I could put a little bit of black with that and darken it down if I want.

I don't wanna lose the green roof against the green trees, that's the whole point.

It's the contrast that's gonna count, what's gonna matter.

If I have to go darker to accomplish that, I will go darker.

It's an adjustment.

And I'm gonna mix a lighter value to put some shingles on this roof.

A suggestion of shingles.

There's the roof.

I'm gonna switch that out, I'm gonna add white base coat to the color I just used.

And I'm just gonna blot in some suggestions of shingles here and there.

It doesn't have to be too technical, it's too far away.

Up underneath that eave, I'm gonna take straight black and thin it down.

And right under the eave like this, I wanna state that.

And I might have to touch that up later, but the clock is counting down on me.

It's running me right on my heels.

I'm gonna take a little bit of burnt sienna and maybe just a speck of black, and I'm gonna put a little chimney on there.

We need the chimney on the house.

Again, make sure you get a value that's gonna show up against your green.

Even though they're different colors, if they're the same degree of lightness or darkness, they're gonna mingle together.

Okay, I think that's gonna show.

And like I said, I'll tweak those windows, touch them up a little bit, square them up, make sure all my lines are crisper before the next episode.

And we can tear this off and when we reconvene on the next episode we'll start moving in with the meadow down to that pump and that pail.

So give this a shot, I hope you do.

It's a really fun project that takes you back to a different time.

Remember when?

Until next time, stay creative and keep painting.

- [Narrator] All 13 episodes of "Painting with Wilson Bickford Series 6" are now available on DVD or Blu-ray in one box set for $35 plus $4.95 shipping and handling.

Or learn the techniques used to paint Stand of Birches with the in depth "Paint Smart Not Hard" series of Wilson Bickford instructional DVDs.

Additional titles available.

Order online or watch or download directly to your computer or mobile device.

More information at wpbstv.org/painting.

(gentle music)