Wilson Bickford: I love to paint all kinds of woodland creatures.

This little fawn looks like he's hungry and about ready to munch down some lunch on those green leaves.

Join me next on Painting with Wilson Bickford and I'll show you how to paint your own version of Whitetail Fawn.

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

I've got a nice little Whitetail Fawn project I want to share with you today.

I love to paint animals.

I do all kinds of animals.

I paint a lot of deer.

I paint fish.

I paint birds, just there's no animal I don't think I've ever not painted.

I've painted elephants.

I've done them all.

We're going to do a nice little whitetail fawn today.

Whitetail deer are very prevalent in the area where I live, and we see deer all the time, so they're one of my favorite subjects.

If you go to the WPBS TV website you'll be able to download a supply list that explains all the tools and supplies that we're using as far as paints.

There's also a sketch that you'll see that you'll be able to print off that you can use to trace your design on.

What I've done is taken this with some graphite transfer paper and a red pen.

If you put this on your canvas ...

This is a transfer paper from an art store.

Lay your sketch on top.

Use the red pen.

Trace the design.

You can put the image right on your canvas very easily.

I've got it all laid out for you.

This is going to start with some acrylics today.

I'm going to be using some black and white acrylic gesso.

I've got that on a foam plate so I can just toss it away.

I do have a little cup of water here that I'll use to thin the acrylics down with because they are water-based.

Once we get past the acrylic stage, we're going to be using oil paints.

I'm going to use some white oil-based medium for the background, which gives us a nice blendability and soft edges where we want them.

This is cobalt blue, ivory black, sap green, cadmium yellow pale, burnt sienna, and titanium white.

I also have some clear glazing medium, which is an alkyd base, which I'm going to use on top of the fawn later on.

You'll see.

I'll explain that when we get there.

As for brushes, I'm going to be using a 2" scenery brush, a #4 filbert brush, a 1" texture brush, a #6 round brush, a #2 liner, a #2 detail script liner, and a #2 long script liner.

I'm also going to be using some masking tape and a utility craft knife.

I know I'm throwing a lot of supplies at you, but there's a lot of prep work in this painting, but as you see it's worth it in the end.

I'll describe these as we get to the stages where we're going to be actually using them.

I'm going to be using some masking tape and a craft utility knife with a #11 blade, very sharp.

Always put your cap back on.

Safety first.

Okay, so once your image is on the canvas like this, we're going to use today what we call a grisaille under-painting.

It's a French word.

It just means gray.

It's a very common thing that artists use.

The old masters even used this technique.

What we're going to do is bring this canvas up to this level in black and white.

That's where I'm going to use the acrylic, so you'll see that you put the sketch on and then you paint.

This will be dry.

I'm going to switch these around and show you how I got to this point.

I'll demonstrate some of it.

I've got a finished one underneath here, but if I go with the black and white acrylic ... By the way, there's also going to be a sketch on the website where you can download this image as your guide, so it shows the black and white version so it gives you a nice reference to work with, so that will be there available with the supply list.

I'm going to take my #2 detail script liner, and you can use whichever brush works for you.

I have a smaller liner, and this is the detail script liner.

What you want to do is think in terms of black and white, like you're taking a black and white photo of this deer, so some of the areas will be darker.

The eye, the nose, they're all just pretty much just straight black.

Some of the areas like his tail, around the tail, are white.

The inside of the ears are white, so you just use that as a roadmap.

If you just mix up a midtone gray, the black is much stronger than the white, so start with white, add a little bit of black to it to get the value that you want.

This is all about value.

Then you come in and it's just a matter of making this look good like a black and white rendition.

Now, this is acrylic, so it dries quickly, so the faster you can work, if you work a little bit faster rather than a little slower, it's easier because you can get in there and work the paint while everything's still wet.

Now see I put in that midtone right here on the back of that ear.

It's darker around the edge, so I'm going to add just a little more black.

Be careful of that black.

It's very strong.

They're not quite dark enough, and see if I go around the perimeter.

Now see it's still damp.

I can wipe the brush off, and come in and just kind of tap and melt those colors together, so that's how I achieve this.

I just kept working my way around.

As you need to rinse your brush, wash it out in the water.

I've got a little cup of water right here.

If I take black, the eye is painted in with black.

Now this under-painting's going to take a little while.

I can do one of these basically in about a half an hour.

It might take you an hour.

It might take you two hours.

That's not the point.

It's all good.

Just take your time.

Always think in your mind as you're doing an under-painting like this, this is all the detail work of this painting.

If your under-painting stage looks great at this stage, the finished product is going to look spectacular.

That's just the way it is.

You got to make sure the under-painting is in place and in good shape.

If it looks good now, it'll look even better later.

See those are the black areas?

And I basically just work my way around, and I compared one value to another.

A lot of times you will be off a little bit, so you have to go back and tweak it and put a little more color on.

You just balance out your lights and your darks.

See how the top of his head here, it's a little darker than the side of his face?

So I come in and I outline that and go around his ear.

If your paint is a little too sticky and not coming off the brush, add just a drop of water to it.

See this is the time-consuming part of this, but it's a great lesson.

I do a lot of paintings utilizing this.

I can get all the detail this way and then glaze a oil color over it, and I don't have to wait for anything to dry.

I can do a piece like this in one day, in just a few hours rather than have to do the whole thing in oil and wait days or weeks for it to dry before I come back and finish it up.

Now see from there I would swish the brush out.

I'd go back to a lighter gray.

I'll add a little bit more white back into that.

It's a lighter value here on his cheek, so I put that lighter tone there and then I work it into the darker tone, and he's got a little bit of white around his eye.

I can actually just leave some canvas there, or you can come back in and paint it with white paint too, and then just pat and bring the colors together, work them together.

You'll see it's going to take a while to do all that.

Just use this as your roadmap.

Like I said, download the sketch.

That's going to tell you where the lights and darks are, and the midtones, and you just want to get a good job done with that under-painting.

Rinse your brushes out when you're done.

This is acrylic.

Make sure that you take care of your brushes.

Rinse it out with water.

You can dispose of the acrylic.

Here's another one that I've done not too long ago, a couple months ago maybe.

Same idea on different pose, different deer, a doe kind of ambling through the woods, but it was done the same way.

This is on a stretched canvas.

A lot of people are very skeptical about doing the trimming that we're going to do next, and they say, "Oh, I don't want to cut on my canvas."

If you use a sharp knife and a light touch, I taped out on that.

I cut on these all the time without cutting through the canvas.

It just takes a sure hand and a little bit of practice.

You might want to practice on a couple of old canvases if you're starting with a stretched one.

See that got to this point, so I can take this one down.

So that brought me to this level, and that would be dry at this point.

This is acrylic.

It dries very quickly.

You could always hit it with a hairdryer.

From there I took tape, and I just carefully masked out the whole deer.

Now don't use a roll of tape that's old.

If you've got a roll that's been sitting in your desk for five or six years, it's probably half dried out.

It tends to leave a residue when you pull it away.

Use a fresh roll of tape and a nice, new, sharp blade.

See if I take this, press it down.

I would put a piece here obviously.

You want to cover the whole thing.

I'm just demonstrating.

Then you take your sharp knife.

It doesn't take much pressure to cut through just the tape and not score into your canvas.

That's why you want to use a sharp blade.

My shop teacher in school always told us in wood shop, "Boys, use a sharp blade.

There's less chance for injury with a sharp blade," because with a dull blade you tend to press too hard and then it's going to slip, and that's where you get an accident.

See if you just trim around that and pull that away, see the deer is all covered up in there.

From that point, safety first.

Put your cap back on your knife always.

From that point, it brought me to this.

Now I know that seems like a whole lot of work with the under-painting, but anything worth doing is worth doing well.

This is a really nice method to learn.

It's going to give you a lot of detail in your work and I think you're going to be happy with it.

From here I've got the deer in place, and my grisaille under-painting.

I usually like to tape off the land.

It's not a necessity, but it makes life a little easier.

I'd rather paint smart than hard.

I take a piece of tape and I'm going to tab this off.

I just want a loose approximation of the land here.

Notice it's running slightly downhill.

You could have it more on an uphill like this, or hollowed out.

It's however you want it.

He's just standing on some land.

Right across the bottom here.

It just keeps this area kind of clean.

See I can twist it and bend the tape just to get it to conform to the shape that I want.

That one's running more on a slant.

I got a little bit of curve in this one.

It's all good.

It's whatever you want.

Okay, I'm going to press that down.

Now we can start in with the oil painting.

Everything we've done up to this point was acrylic with the black and white.

We were using water.

Throw that all out the window, all that information now, because we're moving on to oil, so I'll be thinning and cleaning my brushes and thinning my paint with odorless mineral spirits from here on out.

I'm going to take some of the white base coat on this 2" brush, and I'm going to cover this whole upper half of this canvas, or upper three-quarters I guess I would say.

I don't need to put it down here below.

That's why I taped that off.

I taped that off because I want this to stay relatively dark later on, so it doesn't make any sense to put white down there and then try to keep it dark green.

It's easier just to mask it out.

I use tape a lot.

I got the idea from watercolor artists.

I do some watercolors myself, and they use masking fluid where it's like a liquid rubber cement they can put on their paper to block areas out and then peel it off when they want to put paint there.

We don't have any such luxury as oil painters, so I use tape and it achieves the same end.

It works out really well.

I use tape a lot, actually.

Okay.

From there, put it on nice and thin.

I'm going to start in with my sky.

Notice my sky is rather blotchy.

I've got some open gaps in there.

That's just where I didn't put any blue paint.

I left it open so the sky has depth, and dimension, and atmosphere to it.

I'm going to use some of this cobalt blue.

That looks really dark, but you'll see as I work it into my brush it picks up the residual white that's left in my brush from the base coat.

I mix it and get a uniform tone.

You can make that as light or as dark as you want as far as the value.

I'm going to go a little darker, and if you just lazily just kind of work your way around.

Don't paint it like a wall.

Roll the brush, twist it, turn it.

Let it flow.

I'm purposely leaving some big white patches behind.

Those are going to be those cloud shapes I mentioned.

Now they're not real big puffy cumulous clouds.

That's not what we're doing in this painting today, but it looks like cloud shapes way back in the distance, just enough to keep the sky open.

If you paint it solid blue it looks flat just like a wall.

You don't want a wall.

As I come lower, notice I'm not loading any more paint on the brush.

I purposely want to let the brush run out of paint, so I use a lighter touch.

Still doing the same movement, but I want the value to get lighter, so if I use a lighter touch, I've pretty much exhausted most of the paint out of the brush up here anyway, so there's not much left on it, but I help it along by using a lighter touch.

I'm picking up more of the white base coat as I go lower, and I've lost blue off the brush so it automatically just grades and gets lighter as it comes down.

That has to do with aerial perspective.

The sky in the distance is usually a lighter value than the sky above you.

Now see that looks pretty grainy.

I can wipe this brush off.

I don't really need to wash it.

I can simply just wipe it.

Squeeze some of the paint out of it, and if I come back and do the same thing I lay the brush flush and just a fairly light touch, light to medium pressure.

I don't have to get really aggressive with it.

It's wet, and the paint will just move around very easily, but by doing the same little movement that I was doing before you'll see that it just kind of softens everything together.

It takes the graininess out of it, and that's a pretty good looking sky for the two minutes it took to put it in there, isn't it?

Yeah.

That's one of the easiest skies you can do.

Looks really nice, and it's convincing.

From there I'm going to take my 1" texture brush, and I'm going to put some background trees in here.

These are deciduous trees, leaf trees, not fir trees or pine trees, needle trees.

These are leaf trees, so I'm going to take this brush.

I can actually some of this blue that I've had, because I want some blue in my green anyway.

I want to put in a cooler bluish green, and then highlight it with a warmer, yellowy green.

I'm going to use sap green, and a little bit of the cobalt blue, and I want to start out kind of dark with this so I'm going to add just a little bit of black.

Here's the important part.

You'll notice that I tap the brush to really open the bristles up, so the brush is really loose and frazzled.

That's what I call frazzled.

If I come up and just touch, it starts giving me that leafy texture automatically.

That looks really dark compared to this.

This one's been highlighted over the top.

This one started out pretty dark too.

I'm carving in around the deer in a pleasing way.

Notice I left a little space between his belly and the tree so there's some openness there, rather than boxing him in solidly.

Think about where you're putting it and how you want it to read at the end.

I try to have both sides asymmetrical, which means I don't want the trees on either side to be the same height, because it's going to look like goal posts, so I have one be taller than the other.

See I'll bring that one up just a hair more, just to make sure, just to throw it out so it's not perfect balance.

See by having the tape there at the bottom I can just work down over that.

It's like a bib.

You won't spill anything on your shirt with that tape there.

It's your safety valve.

Makes it easy.

I'd much rather paint smart than hard, so I'm always looking for ways to make the process easier and faster, and get me to a finished painting and an easier route.

I don't want to take the long way around.

Okay.

Now see that's already looking like background trees pretty well.

Okay.

I'm going to lay that brush just to the side for a second because I'm going to come back to it.

I'm going to use my #2 liner, and I need to mix up a darker trunk color.

I'm going to use burnt sienna with a little bit of black.

I'm going to need to thin this down with my paint thinner.

I'm going to roll the brush to a point.

I'm going to steady my hand.

Now this will be relative to how dark your green is.

Make sure that your trunks show up as a contrast and you can see them.

I'm just randomly ... i don't have to put a lot of limbs, and all the branches, and all that busyness into this really.

I can just hit and miss.

Put a few of these in here, they're going to be shrouded in when I put the highlights over the top.

Just because the deer's standing there, don't neglect that area.

I'll stick a few in underneath his body too.

Notice I let them kind of lean to and fro, and they're just not perfectly straight, parallel with the edges of the canvases necessarily.

Some of them could be, but you don't want them all to be.

I just want to fill it up and make it look like distant woods.

Okay.

I'm going to swish that out for later, and I'll set it down here.

I'm going to come back to this brush just like I said I was going to.

This is the one inch texture brush again.

I'm going to wipe that out, and I'm going to put some highlights, warmer yellow sunlit leaf highlights on those trees.

I'm going to take titanium white.

I'm going to keep the brush open.

I'm using the brush in the same manner as I did before.

I'm just using a different color.

I'm going to take white, sap green, and this time some of that cadmium yellow pale, and again I'm frazzling that brush.

I'm opening the bristles right up.

Got a fair amount of paint on that brush, so I can use a light touch to deposit it.

I'm just going to come up and lightly touch, and you'll see it really starts adding dimension, and shape, and form to these trees.

I try to let it fade off and stay a little darker down near the bottom.

Number one, that's where it's fading into the underbrush, and all the little bushes and whatnot, so there's probably less light there anyway.

Number two, it makes a nice, dark edge to put the light area of the grass against it.

I'm putting a light tone against the darker background, so you always want to think of your values.

I'm going to come back over to this side here momentarily.

I'm just going to ...

I just kind of hop around, so I decide wherever I want to do it.

There's no order to it.

Doesn't have to be.

Now as far as a light source, there's more light coming from this side in this painting, so I would probably try to target those sides more, and I'll show you.

I can mix up a re-highlight color.

Let's see how that makes those woods look nice and full.

Don't lose all the dark in there.

The dark is the important part.

The dark is what makes the light show.

You want that depth.

The darkness, those shadows in there are what give it the depth.

Okay, if I want to brighten that a little bit, I can come back with more white and more yellow, and here's the difference between the two colors.

I'm going from this to this, so it's lighter, more yellowy, more sunshiny, sunlit I should say.

This is like the icing on the cake, so don't do it everywhere.

I just kind of pick and choose, and I'll have a few spots that are getting a little more sunlight.

Down in here against that dark you'll really see it start to stand out a little more so.

See that just adds even more depth to it.

You're getting light against dark, and you're getting those value changes.

That's all a painting is.

It's just a matter of putting light against dark, dark against light, hard edges and soft edges, and just knowing where to put everything.

It's really not the rocket science that most people think it is.

Once you try it, you'll find that it's probably a little ...

It takes some practice, but you'll probably find it's a lot easier than what you really thought it was.

All right.

I think that's looking pretty decent.

[MUSIC] When working with a grisaille under-painting, it's a good idea to take your color photo and run it through a photocopier to make a black and white version.

This is the roadmap and all the details you need for your under-painting.

All the values are in place.

This is a photograph that my wife, Glenda, took of this Canada goose and gosling, and if I want to do it in a painting I simply convert it to black and white, and I can make a nice painting out of this from that reference material.

The next order of business is I'm going to pull the deer off.

I'm going to take this off as well.

Now you could either use the sharp utility knife to dig under the tape to pry the tape off, or you could use your small painting knife.

Now this one was not on the supply list because I don't have any plans of really using it other than this, but this makes a good one to dig underneath the tape to take the tape off.

If you come in and carefully pry under your tape, your little deer should still be underneath there.

Sometimes it's just a matter of getting a good grab on it to get it started.

Now see that went on in pieces, so it'll come off in pieces, but your little friend will still be underneath there.

Be careful you don't scratch your canvas as you're doing that.

See if your canvas was stuck ...

Excuse me, if your tape was stuck down adequately, you shouldn't have too many issues as far as bleed underneath.

You'll have a clean image there to work with.

You'll notice that I wiped the blade off because sometimes you will pick up paint on that blade just from the tape where it touches.

I've still got an ear and a leg to do here.

He's deaf in one ear, see that?

It's covered up.

There we go.

Now he can hear again, and this leg.

From here, we're going to add oil glazes.

A glaze is simply a transparent wash of color, and you want to make sure it's transparent.

By transparent I mean that you can see through it, so you don't ever want to use white in your glaze.

You want to keep a nice transparent color.

We're going to use burnt sienna, and some of the clear glazing medium.

We can put a wash on there.

I can put the dots on him that these fawns are known for.

I can put some cooler shadows underneath his belly.

I can enhance the white markings on his throat and on his chin.

We'll put the grass and the tree in.

If you decide to give this painting a try, I'd love to see your version of it.

You can send me a copy on my Facebook message, or through my email.

You'll find my contact info at wilsonbickford.com, and until then, stay creative and keep painting.

Announcer: All 13 episodes of Painting With Wilson Bickford, Series #300 are now available on DVD in one boxed set for $35 plus $4.95 shipping and handling.

Learn the techniques used to paint "Majestic Mountain" with this new exclusive in-depth Wilson Bickford instructional DVD.

Also available: Wilson Bickford's Rose Painting Techniques DVD with in-depth lessons on painting roses, stems, and leaves.

And Wilson Bickford's Landscapes Techniques DVD -- learn to paint skies, trees, water, and grasses.

Order online at wpbstv.org!

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