Wilson Bickford: Here in Northern New York we get lots of snow and I'm used to it and I love painting snowy scenes.

So join me next on Painting with Wilson Bickford as we paint "Silent Night."

[MUSIC] [MUSIC] Hi, welcome to Painting with Wilson Bickford.

I've got a fantastic little winter scene I want to share with you today, this has been one of my most popular projects, as of late I've probably taught this project 15 to 20 times in the last couple months.

My students have loved it and it makes a great Christmas gift, it makes a great Christmas card if you want to print your own cards from it.

So I wanted to share this with you today.

I'm using an 11 by 14 canvas panel, I'm going to start out with a little bit of a sketch, just a light, loose sketch just to kind of denote where the snow line is.

I've got a lot of work to do on this one today so we're going to get right into this.

I'm going to put a little bit of a faint line just to show where my snow line is, with a pencil.

From there I'm going to take some masking tape, this is just run of the mill, ordinary masking tape right from my local hardware store.

Nothing fancy, nothing special about it.

I'm going to take some of the tape and I want to tape off the snow, that way I can come in and freely just put the background in there and not worry about getting my snow contaminated down here where I want it whiter later on, and I don't have to get fancy and trim this tape, I just twist it, bend it, twerk it and make it fit the contour.

Pretty simple.

The edge will be a little ragged because I'm getting these little folds in the tape but I will straighten that out with a brush later when I paint the snow, so it's not an issue at all.

I like to use tape a lot because it just makes life easier when I'm painting.

Okay, now that line is all protected.

I'm using oil paints today, on my palette I have ultramarine blue, ivory black, titanium white and a white basecoat medium, which is fluid, it blends the background very nicely, makes the soft subtle tones and gradations where we need them.

For tools I'm going to be using a two-inch scenery brush, a number ten flat brush, a number three fan brush, a large mop brush for blending some of the soft areas, a number six flat brush, a smaller flat brush, a little brother to that big flat brush I just showed you a moment ago, and I have a couple of liners here, one is a number two detail script liner, which is fuller, fluffier, it's a bigger brush, holds more paint.

It's good for certain things and I have a much smaller one which is the liner, and that's a much finer brush which is good -- going to be good for doing all those nice little tree branches back there.

Okay, what do you say, let's paint.

I'm going to take my two-inch scenery brush and some of this white base coat and I want to premix my color, I want just a solid color here in the background.

It's night time, so if I put the white on and blend blue into it like I normally would you get variations of light and dark which is great if you're doing a summer blue sky day.

For something like this I just want a solid blanket more or less, like night time sky in the backdrop.

They key is to get this dark enough so it conveys the feeling of night time.

So I'm going to take some of the white with blue.

By putting it on this way with it premixed I don't get variations, I get a solid tone.

Now obviously see if I just go with the lighter blue like that it's too close to day time and it's just not giving me the mood that I want.

So I'm going to take more blue to darken it and a little bit of the ivory black, that black is very, very strong, so I don't need much of that.

But you'll see that this is getting darker and greyer and getting closer to what I'm going to want for a night time sky.

Now some of you will want it bluer like that, some of you might prefer it a little more grey, and if that's the case you simply add a little more black, and it's going to give you a greyer tone.

Personally I like blue but since I've got this premixed I'm going to go with this tone and I'm just going to cover this whole sky area.

The key is just get a color that you like, everybody's an individual, everybody likes something different, so just get a color that you like, but see by putting it on this way it stays an even tone, which is what I was shooting for.

And since I have that line taped off I don't have to worry about getting this dark color down to where I want white snow later on.

That's what I say, the taping makes it so much easier.

A little pre-planning in your painting and not just flying by the seat of your pants will go a long way to a successful outcome.

I like to plan things out a little bit so it makes my life easier.

This is a brand new brush so it's shedding a few hairs here, I'll just flick those off as they come loose.

Every brush sheds like that when they're new.

I tell my students all the time, if I grabbed you by the ankles and rubbed your hair on the floor that hard your hair would break off too, right?

Absolutely.

Okay, there's my sky.

Now into that I want to put the glow of the moon, there's an aura around that moon.

So I'm going to take my fan brush, I'm going to take a little bit of this thick titanium white on my palette and mix it with a little bit of the sky color I just used, I don't want it pure white, I'm going to save my brightest color for the actual moon itself.

So I'm going to kind of get a mixture here of white and this color so it's like a mid-tone in between.

And the moon is about a third of the way in from the right of the canvas, so if I just kind of mark a spot where I think I want my moon.

I'm just going to lay the brush really flat and watch my hand and my fingers.

I'm just going to rotate the brush and spin it right around and around, and you'll see it starts giving me that nice little glow.

I'm going to put just a little more paint on there.

Now I don't want it to look like somebody set a wet coffee mug on there and it left a ring on your end table, so I have to come in and blend this, but that's why I'm going to use that large mop brush, it works great for this.

See, the more I work that in you'll see it starts losing some of the texture in the brush strokes and it looks very soft.

I can further refine that with my mop brush.

If I come in and just very lightly dust over it you'll see it just hazes it right out, it looks like a soft glow, it'll look a whole lot different to you once I put the moon into that.

But that'll give you the idea, see how easy that is to achieve, just very lightly with the mop, just enough to kind of soften it out.

And there's your glow and your aura.

You want it to look a little hazy.

Alright, pretty cool, huh?

I'm going to take my fan brush and I'm going to wash it out.

I do have some odorless mineral spirits here in my bucket and I'm going to scrub this brush out and I'll dry it off on a towel.

And I'm going to start this painting out with stars in the sky.

Now if you look at this it looks like snow because the whole thing is spattered, it's got dots all over it, but you can do this different ways depending on how you feel about it.

If I spatter it now and I don't spatter it later it'll look like stars in the sky because only the upper half will have the dots, the bottom won't, and I'll show you it both ways.

Okay, I'm going to go into some of that white basecoat.

This is already quite thin but I need it a little bit thinner to be able to spatter.

So I'm going to put a little bit of my paint thinner here with it.

And the idea is to load your brush up and just pull the bristles back, let them spring forward, snap forward.

This is a stiff bristle brush, so they have spring and you'll see that I get a nice little suggestion of stars in that sky.

Don't be afraid to put some in the glow.

A lot of people try to avoid the glow, like I don't want to get it in that glow.

You certainly do, you want it in that glow because notice how that anchors the glow to the sky, because you're seeing the sky or the stars -- excuse me -- the stars through that transparent aura, so you definitely want to put some in there.

And you know, on any given night, some nights there's no stars at all, some nights you can count seven, some nights there's a billion.

So however much of that you put into it is totally your call but that's how easy it is to achieve that.

We've got a couple different type of trees in this painting.

I've got some deciduous trees here that have lost their leaves for the winter in the background, and then I've got some fir trees that are heavily laden with snow in front of those, they're all kind of sitting on the verge of the hill, so I'm going to paint them all right from the tape up into the painting.

For those finer trees back here I'm going to use my little liner, this is the number two liner, this is the skinnier of the two brushes that I mentioned earlier.

I'm going to simply put those in black.

Now these can be kind of time consuming, so I'm going to show you how to do these.

I'm taking ivory black straight by itself with some paint thinner and you'll notice on my palette I've got this thin down quite well, it's quite thin.

Almost watery thin and I roll the brush right full, those tips, the bristles are full, right from the metal ferrel to the tip of the bristle.

Don't just dab the end of it.

We're going to load this up, I'm going to show you on a piece of card stock here.

When I do those trees I just pull up a trunk line and then I pull a few limbs off either side.

Now obviously you can embellish this as long and as much as you want to, I'm kind of under the gun here for the show today but this is the general idea of it.

Now the difference is I'm working on dry paper here, on the canvas it will be wet.

So it takes a little extra practice, you've just got to make sure your paint is thin.

If your paint is thin enough it will glide right over that wet background paint.

Now I'm going to have to get in here and lean in to steady my hand on some of these, which you'll see, I'm just going to put on some of these trees.

And instead of putting a tree, a tree, a tree I tend to put them in groves.

They look a little nicer, a little fuller, more woodsy.

These are all going to be sitting out on the North 40 once I put the fir trees in front of those, notice how the fir trees kind of push them back.

So I don't have to get too carried away and too detailed with these, just a suggestion these will be plenty.

So I'm just going to kind of intersperse these throughout and along the hillside, anywhere I feel like I want them.

Make sure they're not all the same height, you want some a little bigger than others, some are a little shorter, leave some gaps in between the groves and I'm going to put some of these in, I'll be right back with you.

[MUSIC] If you want to change the feel of your painting and change it from just a starry night to a snowy night, use the same spatter mixture that we used for the stars and just speckle the whole piece now, and the stars from before suddenly become snowflakes.

Pretty cool, huh?

Welcome back.

Well as I said, I put in all the little distant leafless trees into the background, I made sure that they're different heights, different spacings, different groupings, just to make it interesting and to look natural.

I need to put the moon in this painting, so what I'm going to do is take a paper towel and wrap it around my index finger and right in the middle of that glow I'm simply going to touch like this and rock my finger back and forth, we'll remove some paint, and I'm going to paint that in so it will be brighter than that.

Basically what I'm trying to do is remove a little bit of paint so it'll stay brighter when I actually paint it in, I'm getting some of the background paint out of the way and I'm marking where I want it.

I'm going to take my number six small flat brush and I'm going to take some of this thick titanium white on my palette, and I'm going to chisel the brush up, nice and sharp like this.

And if I come in I've got to lean in here, if I come in and just turn this around between my fingers it gives me a pretty good little circle.

A lot of people in my class say well I can't paint a straight line.

I got news for you, it's much harder to paint a perfect circle than it is a straight line.

But this brush works pretty well and if you just kind of turn it -- you might have to tinker with the edges a little bit, get it as round as you can get it, it's a pretty easy process, you'll have time to fiddle with that.

I'm going to take the number two detail liner because I don't want to leave it just flat like that, it looks like a white marble, I want to put some craters in it so it looks like the moon.

Now this is that fluffier liner brush I told you about earlier.

I'm going to take just a little bit of some of this darker color that's left on my palette, that's actually my sky color.

If it's too dark bleed it in to a little bit of that aura color, I've got both those values right there.

Don't get it too dark, but you want it dark enough to show up, and see I've just pounced the brush very loosely and it's open.

If I come in and just kind of lightly touch in a couple of spots it puts a little bit of texture in there, so it looks like you got craters, it doesn't look flat anymore.

If I wipe the brush off now and I hold it really flat, don't go in with the end, if I hold it really flat and I just lightly tap it a little bit, it softens it in.

Now a lot of times my students will have trouble with that and they get too much blue in there.

If that happens it's a simple fix, swish the blue out of your brush and your thinner, take a little more white and you're going to put a little bit of white back in there if it needs it, it's an easy adjustment.

Painting is nothing more than a series of adjustments, you're always putting one value against the next, light against dark, hard edges against soft edges, it's a balancing act, so if you make what you think is a mistake it's easy to correct, nine times out of ten.

Okay, I'm going to move forward now and start putting some of these fir trees in.

You'll notice they're heavily laden with snow, we've got to base them in darkly first and get them in there before we can lay the snow on them.

So I'm going to show you how I do those and again, these are going to be kind of time consuming so once I've shown you how to do this I'll put a couple on my canvas and I'm going to have to skip out and finish some of these off for you.

But I'm going to use the detail script liner, same brush I just used.

I want a dark value, I don't necessarily want it black but I want something that's the first cousin to black, so I'm going to take black, a little bit of blue.

Everything in this painting is kind of darkish, as far as the elements in the trees and whatnot, obviously this snow and the moon are lighter, but anything that's going to be silhouetted with that moonlight is going to be dark, it's night time.

Now see I take this paint and I thin it down quite generously and I roll that brush right full.

This holds a lot more paint than that other liner that I used for these trees, this is the detailed script liner, this was the liner.

Two different brushes, two different purposes.

So if I take this I basically just kind of draw down a trunk line and I dab, I'm kind of dabbing from the middle of the trunk line out and just a little jittery fashion, they're just rough branches and needle-y branches hanging out on either side, it's actually pretty easily -- easily done.

So just let it taper, a little wider as you come down, I'm going to bring these right down off my tape where my tape line is taped off here.

Here's a couple of things that you shouldn't do, a lot of times in my class I see students just do the obvious and they just basically kind of draw lines across.

That's great if you're drawing a ladder but we don't want any ladders.

The other thing is sometimes they get too wide too soon, they get really wide at the top and then they lose control of it and they start getting too wide and it starts taking on the shape of a pyramid, you don't want that either, keep it nice and spindly.

So I'm going to put a couple of those on my canvas and then I'm going to finish those up and I'll be back with you.

So you can put these anywhere you want, they're trees, trees are trees so they don't have to be any specific size.

They could be smaller, taller, some people put them on their canvas this big, some people have them really small, it doesn't matter.

The fact is they're kind of over the hill so you can't really tell where they're rooted in.

They might be a taller tree but you're only seeing three quarters of it because they're over the hill, so there's really no right or wrong to it.

So I get my paint really fluid a lot on the brush and I just kind of dab, I put these branches on.

Now it'll probably be to your best interest to practice some of these on a piece of scrap paper or a spare canvas, whatever you've got you can work with.

You'll see that a little bit of practice with these goes a long way.

Make sure they're dark enough to silhouette nicely against your background because we're going to put snow on these and you're going to lose some of that contrast.

So I'm going to bring them right down off my tape.

So I'm going to finish these out and put some trees in here and I'll be right back again.

There, I've got my trees completed.

I didn't put quite as many as this painting but you obviously can add as many as you want in your own painting, I'm just showing you the techniques.

I need to put some blue shadowed snow laying on those tree branches and they're followed by some white.

So I'm going to take some of this white basecoat that's still left on my palette with white and ultramarine blue.

I want it to look kind of shadowy, this is night time so the -- not all the trees are going to be illuminated with the moonlight.

I scoop this right up and I literally kind of lay it on those branches.

Now if it feels like it's not sticking thin your paint down a little more with some paint thinner.

Mine's just on the verge of not wanting to stick there so if I put a little more thinner with it it releases off my brush a lot easier.

And see I'm just kind of doing that same little jittery movement, laying a little bit of a lighter tone on top of those branches I've already created.

Half the battle of this is getting enough paint on your brush and making sure it's thin enough.

If it doesn't stick put more on your brush, make sure it's thinner, and then it'll bond just like mine is doing right here for me.

A lot of people have trouble with this, they just simply don't get it thin enough, don't use enough paint, which you'll see that gives the trees some shape and form.

Don't lose all the dark within the tree, that's what gives it the depth.

Notice how the trees look three-dimensional now with that little bit of lighter tone, the darks recede into the middle of the tree, the lighter blues tend to come forward so it gives you depth and distance, and volume on these trees.

Now one's closest to the moon, I want to put a little bit of a white accent, you'll notice that I've got a little more brightness going on there.

I don't take it all the way up to the outer edge, I'm kind of building up a focal area in this area here.

So I swish the brush out, I'm going to take more white basecoat, a little thinner, particularly the trees around the moon.

I'm going to put a little bit of white on them just to enhance them and brighten those up a little bit like they're getting a little -- they're closer to the light source.

So they're getting a little more light on that snow.

And you'll see it really makes them stand out.

I know you're dying to try this one, right?

Yeah.

This has been a really popular one, everybody's been liking this one.

Give it a whirl.

You can contact me through email at my website, or send me photos on Facebook, I love to see what you do with it.

I'll put just a sprinkling over here but I want to do less as I come away from the light source.

So I tend to do less and less.

But think branches as you're dabbing this on here.

Okay, drum roll please.

From here this is why I put the tape on.

See how it kept a nice, smooth line for me?

I need to put some basecoat on here, to cut in up around here I'm going to use the large number ten flat and I have to be a little careful and dance around that line a little bit but anything where I need to smooth it out I can do that right now.

And if you remember I still have that big two-inch brush that I put my sky in with, it still has my sky color in it.

So I'm going to use that down here to make my shadows.

I like to use that rather than mix up a foreign color because it's color harmony, I'm using the same color in the snow shadows as I'm using in the actual sky, so it repeats itself.

I'm going to go back to this brush, it's the one I used earlier, and see if gives me color harmony and continuity, I'm not using a -- mixing up a different color that I don't quite match, this will match perfectly.

And I didn't put base color all the way down the bottom, I didn't need to, so see I left that area kind of dry and then I mingle it up into the basecoat so they kind of literally melt together, no pun intended since that's snow.

But see it gives us that nice glow moonlight on the hill.

That's pretty cool, isn't it?

Okay, a couple more things we've got to do here, I need to put in some -- cast shadows from the trees.

Cast shadows are always darker than form shadows, this is what's known as a form shadow, it shows the shape of something.

So I need something a little darker than what that is, so I can just pull from these colors I have on my palette, I can take my sky color, add a little bit of that darker value black and blue-grey that I had, add a little more blue, and basically I'm just going to do the trees upside down.

If the light is coming from this way probably the shadow over the hill is going to spill this way off that tree.

They tend to get a little flatter as they come farther from the source.

So you have to look at it logically, yours is going to be different, depends on where you laid out your trees.

See the angle here is probably going to be about here, this one will be a little more vertical, and I'm paying attention to the heights, the longer, taller tree will cast the longer shadow.

And then I simply just do the tree upside down.

Just kind of like I did up here.

Leave it open with those little pockets of light showing between the branches, that's what makes it look so good.

See I get kind of loose and jittery with it and it looks just like a cast shadow from that tree falling over the hill.

Just be really loose, you can always make it a little fuller, don't fill it up right off the bat and get it too full, I'm bringing it right up to the top of the hill so the shadow is actually touching the tree.

Okay, I'm going to finish up these couple of shadows, I'll be right back.

I've put in thecast shadows from the trees on the hillside.

Sometimes I like to leave them more dominant like that, sometimes I like to soften them a bit, so you're going to have to be the judge of that.

If you look at it, you like them a little softer, leave it, because sometimes cast shadows are very hard like that.

If you want to soften it you can actually take your mop brush and I'm just barely touching here but you can just kind of soften those and smudge them out a little bit if you prefer that look.

You want to wipe your brush off as you do it.

I'm going to put a few little undulating shadows down here if you want to break this area up.

Down in here you'll notice I got some little contours and little shadow pockets.

I can take some of this darker color that I had before in my palette and if I just randomly kind of scuff it in like this it looks pretty awful at the start but we got to blend it.

I simply come back with my two-inch brush, my same dirty one, and if I blend over it a little bit you'll see you get those little undulating shadow pockets, looks like you got some unevenness.

You've got to think there's grass clumps and stuff underneath there.

Okay lastly, if you want to put a branch in here to bring something of a closer element in here, I did start out with the liner brush way back when but if this is not going to be enough brush to do the long sweeping lines you can use a much longer script liner, like this.

And basically I just take black, I thin it down really generously with paint thinner, and have the brush loaded right from stem to stern, right from the tip of the bristle right to the metal ferrel.

I've got to get in here and lean a little bit so I'm hoping I'm not blocking the view.

But use less pressure as you come into the painting so they taper away skinny like branches do.

You'll have a lot of time to elaborate on this when you paint it at home.

I'm getting down to the wire here, but you can add these branches, you can always come back, put a little bit of the blue tone that we had on there for the shading, like we did on the trees back here.

Lay a little blue on there, here and there.

You can also swish your brush out, put a little bit of the white highlighted snow on there as well, thin it down generously, just to kind of deposit it on the top so the branches, wherever you think the snow is going to collect on those branches.

Okay, that's going to bring us to the end of this show, but thanks for tuning in, thanks for watching, until next time stay creative and keep painting.

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