- Like old barns, covered bridges have a lot of character and interest, especially if you're an artist or a photographer.
Join me next on "Painting with Wilson Bickford" and I'll show you how to paint your own version of "Bridging the Gap."
(gentle music) - [Announcer] Support for "Painting with Wilson Bickford" is provided by the J.M.
McDonald foundation, continuing the example modeled by J.M.
MacDonald by contributing to education, health, humanities and human services, sharing since 1952, online at jmMcDonaldFoundation.org.
(upbeat music) In rural New York state bordered by the St. Lawrence River in the Adirondack Mountains is a sprawling landscape with communities that offer self-guided tours for the creatively inclined.
Learn the stories behind the barn-filled traditions, family, agriculture, nature, and beauty.
St. Lawrence County, life undiscovered.
- Hi, thanks for tuning in with me today.
I got a nice little covered bridge project I wanna share with you today.
I love to paint old bridges, barns, lighthouses, all these old structures, and today's gonna be a great lesson in how to render that barn board texture.
I've have underpainted this one with some black acrylic gesso to start and I've mashed it out with tape as always.
And I'll talk about that in just a few minutes.
But I wanted to share with you some of my other ideas here just to give you some inspiration to paint your own designs.
I do a lot of bridges and barns.
Like I said, I love to paint old barns.
They're one of my favorite subjects.
So there's just one I did recently, a nighttime scene.
Looks like somebody's in the barn, doing nighttime chores maybe.
And I got a few of 'em here I just wanted to share.
This is one I've been teaching in my classes around here locally, recently.
Old barns make great subjects and the old bridges.
And the fact is, they're not gonna be around forever.
They kind of crumble into decay and everybody's building modern ones nowadays.
I've got a really nice bridge one here that we've been doing in classes around it.
We'd do a couple of classes on this one, 'cause obviously there's quite a bit to this one.
It takes us a couple sessions to complete it, but it'll give you some ideas and maybe some inspiration to do your own designs.
Okay, like I said before, I'll go through the supplies here in the prep work.
If you go to the WPBS-TV website, you'll be able to download a supply list and I'm gonna go through all the supplies here momentarily.
You'll have the list right in front of you of all the materials we're using.
There's also a sketch that you can transfer.
So I've made the drawing for you if you don't wanna draw your own design.
You put it on.
Lay graphite transfer paper underneath it.
And I like to use the red pen to trace the design because the red pen shows up on the dark line, so you can track your progress, easier to keep track of.
I've put the design on.
And then I took a number six flat brush with some black acrylic gesso, and I underpainted the wooden portion of the barn, not the roof, but all the boards with black acrylic.
And I did the water right here.
Once that was dry, I took some masking tape and everybody always asking me about my masking tape.
This is just normal, everyday masking tape from the hardware store, nothing fancy.
I put a couple layers on there, covered it up.
I used my little craft utility knife to carefully trim away everything that wasn't part of the bridge.
I didn't feel it necessary to cover the water, so I didn't, but the bridge is blocked out so I can freely put the background in over the top.
And that's the prep work.
So this will be a two-part lesson.
I'm gonna spend a couple sessions on this just to do it justice.
I don't wanna breeze through it too quickly so you don't grasp it.
For materials today, as far as the oil paints go, I'm using Ultramarine Blue, Cadmium Red Light, Ivory Black, Cadmium Yellow Pale, Burnt Sienna, and Titanium White.
I'm also gonna be using some white base coat and some clear glazing medium that I've still got to put out on my palette here.
For brushes, I'm using a two-inch scenery brush, a number three fan brush, a number six small flat brush, a number 10 large flat brush, a number two detailed scriptliner, and a number two liner.
And look at, that just as quick as that, miraculously my mediums appeared on my palette.
I'd forgotten to put those out.
Okay.
So this is all massed out and ready to roll.
So you ready to paint?
So am I, let's do it.
I'm gonna start with my two-inch scenery brush.
I'm gonna take some of this white base coat.
I'm gonna wet down the sky area and into the trees a little bit.
I'm not gonna do the whole canvas.
I'm gonna leave this dry down here.
I only put this white base coat where I need to do some fine-tune blending.
I want nice soft edges in that sky.
So I'm not gonna lubricate the whole canvas this time.
Don't need to.
I'll go right in over the tree tops a little bit 'cause I wanna fuzz those out against the soft background, make 'em look distant.
So I'm gonna scrub this in very, very thinly.
And then I'm gonna pick up some Ultramarine Blue on the brush and develop my sky.
I didn't spend a lot of time putting clouds in this particular sky.
I just put in some blue and left it blotchy.
It implies that there are cloud shapes in there, but I didn't actually paint clouds.
I wasn't after that much detail in that particular sky.
So I'm gonna take the dirty brush with the white that's in it and a little bit of this Ultramarine Blue.
Blue is my favorite color.
You may have heard that somewhere along the line.
I loves me some blue.
Okay, work it in evenly so there's no chunks or streaks in your brush.
You got a uniform color.
You can make it lighter or darker, whatever you choose.
Watch how I do this.
I'm gonna slow down.
I just, I roll the brush, I twist it, I turn it.
I'm leaving some white pockets in my wake.
As I go lower, I release the pressure on the brush.
I don't press down quite as hard and you'll see it gets a little fainter, a little lighter.
It will be lighter at the horizon.
That has to do with aerial perspective.
Anything in the distance is at a lighter value, and that goes for the sky too.
I can see where my tree line was.
I'm not handcuffed to that.
I can go taller with my trees if I choose to, but I'm gonna go low enough where I know my trees are gonna encounter that sky that I can blend the edge away.
And see, I'm leaving it kind of blotchy.
This one's a little bit darker blue, but that's all right.
Make it as light or as dark as you choose.
I'm gonna wipe this brush off.
No need to wash it.
You'll see that I'm not much of a brush washer.
95% of the time you can simply wipe your brush off and keep going.
So I'm just gonna come in and do little circles or ovals like this to soften that out.
You'll see that it just softens everything right down so nice.
Is that an easy sky to do or what?
Very convincing.
Very easy, quick, painless.
Painting doesn't have to be difficult.
People make it difficult.
Don't nag it to death.
See that looks like a sky.
That's all I'm after.
I'll lay this brush to the side and I'm gonna pick up a fan brush.
Now here's a story I wanna tell you.
This is a tale of two fan brushes.
This one is pretty new.
I've used it a couple times on this series.
Other than that, it was brand new out of the box.
This one is one that's been used and been around for awhile.
You'll notice it's a little bit rattier.
If we can get a nice close up on that.
See how smooth and round this one is, and precise?
This one looks like it had a bad hair day.
This one is gonna work better for what I'm doing today for all this textural work.
Don't ever throw away a fan brush.
I have a bunch of these old ratted out ones.
They're my best brushes.
They work, the more you abuse 'em, the better they work for this type of stuff, anytime you want texture.
So I'm gonna take some Burnt Sienna, a little bit of white, maybe just a speck of this Cad Red Light.
I'm shooting for this kind of orangy autumn color over here.
I don't wanna get it too, too bright and too artificial-looking.
I'm gonna mix this up.
I'm gonna put some right up here and try it.
Now, I see my landline here, so it's gonna go right from there up.
So I had my sketch in place and I'm just gonna dab some of this on here and see what I think.
Yeah, works for me.
That's not too bad.
I'm gonna establish this all the way across, right down to where the grass line will be.
And see the canvas is dry right there.
I didn't put any base coat.
So notice that it doesn't alter the color.
It's not lightening it up too much.
I didn't need it there, so that's why I didn't put it there.
I just wanna get a nice, crisp line right against where the grass is going to meet it.
And notice I tap the bristles open on the brush.
There's not really a lot of paint on that brush.
Don't need much.
And then I'm gonna come in and tap with the corner.
And I just wanna get the loose feel of some trees, a tree line back here.
You can make 'em as tall or as short as you want.
Just make sure everything is varied.
You want 'em different heights, different distances apart.
There should be no rhyme or reason to it.
And see now that I'm tapping up into that wet sky area where I did have the base coat and the blue, see how it really softens it.
Soft edges recede.
That's gonna push that area back a zillion miles, make it look very far away, so when we put that bridge in front, that's really gonna look like it's coming forward.
That was all part of my plan.
And see these look a little flat right here.
So I'm gonna give 'em some depth.
By that, I mean I'm going to alter the value.
I'm going a little taller right here with this tree.
I don't want 'em to be all, you know, too much of a monotonous line across there.
I step back and I analyze it a little bit.
I check it out.
I just make sure there's a nice flow, but they're all different.
Okay, what I was saying that these look a little flat 'cause they're too much the same color.
I wanna go a little darker, a little deeper down here at the bottom.
There's gonna be more shadows at the bottom of the tree line.
So having said that, I'm gonna take a little bit more of Burnt Sienna, maybe just a speck of black.
The black is really potent.
You're not gonna need much of it.
I wanna go darker down here in the shadows.
There we go.
Now the key here is, when I put this in, I have to melt it up into that previous color, I can't just leave that line through there.
It's a very easy process.
It's just tapping.
So see how that left that really hard division?
I'm just gonna go between the two from dark up to light, from light back down to dark, and I'm gonna split the difference this way.
I can't keep just going across 'cause the line will never disappear.
But if I marry them together, one end to the other, top to bottom, you'll see that it makes it a little deeper and darker, shadowy at the base of the tree line.
Gives it a little more depth.
See how they're a little lighter at the top?
Compare that side to that side.
See how this looks like it's got more depth to it?
That's all it is.
Very easy, quick adjustment.
It's one of those things that a lot of people would overlook, but sometimes you just gotta pay a little closer attention to the details.
Usually the smallest little adjustment makes the biggest difference.
I don't know why that is, but it is.
Just something, a little small thing that you would think would be insignificant makes all the difference in the end.
All right, that looks pretty good for that.
I'm gonna take the number two liner.
This is the skinnier of the two brushes that I'm using for the liner.
I also have a detailed script liner that I'm gonna use on the bridge itself later.
I'm gonna thin this down.
I'll take, start with the same color as a base.
I'm gonna add a little more black.
I want a darker brownish gray.
I'm gonna put these tree trunks in.
And again, these aren't gonna be anything too dominant, just enough to say that there's a skeleton of some bones in there holding these leaves up.
Sounds like a Halloween analogy, doesn't it?
Skeletons and bones.
And see, I'm thinning this paint down.
It's thinned down pretty much like milk consistency.
You gotta have it quite thin.
And I'm just, I'm not getting fancy putting on a lot of limbs and branches.
The trunks will be the fattest part of the trees back in here and see, I'm not just painting one, two trees, I'm making it look like there's a whole forest in here.
There's gonna be other shorter trees in front.
And it's gonna be deep from front to back.
There's gonna be a lot going on.
And these look a little bit just painted on over the top.
Do you know why?
Because they are, you betcha, but I'm gonna cure that.
These are short sleeves I got on, but I got a lot of tricks up those sleeves, believe me.
There isn't too much that I haven't seen or done with a paintbrush, so it's just comes from experience.
The only difference between myself and some of you out there is I've probably done stuff like this a lot more than you have.
I've been doing this for 30 years, so.
And I've always been, I'm 61, and ever since I was a kid, five years old, I've drawn and doodled, so I'm pretty good at drawing and it just comes from experience and practice doing it.
Okay, I'm gonna go back to this fan brush.
That doesn't mean it's too late to start.
If you're just starting, you can catch up.
You can get to, you can get to where you can do this.
I'm gonna take this fan brush, the dirty one I had before and I'm gonna wipe this off.
I'm not gonna brush this way, I'm gonna just tap with the backside of the brush and you'll see it just kind of softens those lines into the trees where they look like they're sitting inside the trees and not just stuck on the side, on the outside.
It doesn't take much.
I'm just tapping.
If they're not going away, tap a little harder, just a little bit.
It won't take much just to soften those in.
Then it looks like we got a whole forest back there.
That's pretty cool, isn't it?
Okay, now I'm gonna start moving forward.
I wanna do this foundation.
This is just an old stone foundation and a lot of it's gonna be covered on either side with this area of the bank and on this side, so I don't have to get too critical with it.
I'm not gonna sweat the small details too much, but I'm gonna switch over and use my number two detail script liner.
This is a fuller brush.
It'll roll to a point too, where it's fuller than the last liner I just used.
I'm going to dip into some paint thinner and I'll use some of this white-based coat here since I have some right on my palette.
I wanna make a mortar color, something like cement, mortar between blocks where they put blocks together.
This one I used kind of a brownish tone, so it tells me I used white with black and I put just a touch of Burnt Sienna in it.
I'm gonna try to go a little more gray today just for the heck of it.
And I'm just gonna put a thin coat of this on there.
There's a couple of different ways to do this.
You could paint it like this and then put the stones in it.
Some people prefer to go the other way and paint like a variegated color, grays and browns and then just paint the grout lines in between them.
Well, they're not really grout lines, but you know what I mean.
It's like tile, it'd be the negative spaces in between where the mortar is.
So I'm gonna put that on.
I'm gonna switch to this brush.
Ooh, well that was a mouthfull.
Swish this brush out.
Say that three times really fast, I dare ya.
(chuckles) And I'm gonna put some of the stones in there.
So I'm just gonna come back with something darker.
I can build right off this same color.
I'll take a little more black, maybe a little touch of the Sienna into that.
I'm gonna roll the brush kinda to a point more so.
And I just randomly dab in there.
These are stones, they're not bricks, so.
My old house that I live in, I've lived here 40 years.
It's an older fixer-upper my wife and I have had and down cellar, there's, it's a stone cellar and some of the stones are this big and some of them are this big, whatever they could find just to pile on there and cement together.
These old foundations are pretty interesting.
And see, I don't wanna do all the same color, so I'm gonna put some in like that, and then I'm gonna alter my color a little bit.
I'll bleed a little bit more of this black into that.
And it'll be a little darker, a little grayer.
Like I said, most of this is gonna get covered up probably, but just in case you leave it more open, you want it to look like it's a foundation.
And you can take your time with this.
It's not that much of an important area to the painting, so I'm not too critical of it, but I wanna get it in there.
All right.
So much for that.
That was easy, right?
Yeah, you can do that.
I know you can.
Okay, I'm gonna take the number 10 flat brush.
I'm gonna base in the water.
I just wanna put some blue tone in here so it looks like you've got some blue sky reflecting into the water and notice how some of the dark shows right through it.
I can leave some spaces of black in between and where I scrub it down thinly, the black actually shows through the blue and grays it.
So it's a little bit of a combination of all of that.
So what I'm gonna do is just take some of this sky color right here that's on my palette.
The same stuff I used on that big two-inch brush where we dropped that sky in.
I'm gonna put just a little bit of white with that.
I don't want it quite so dark maybe.
And I'll put a couple of different values in this just to liven it up.
I'm gonna chisel the brush together like this.
You'll notice if I mat it on two sides, it comes to a razor edge.
And then I can do little skinny lines with that.
So I've got to move over here.
I'm hoping my shoulder's not gonna block you.
I'm gonna put some little wave lines in here.
When my brush goes down to the palette, I'm just rechiseling it.
Once you do a few strokes like this, it widens out, so I have to keep just reforming it, reshaping it on my palette.
And see, it doesn't matter if you get over here on your grass.
Don't sweat it, guys.
Don't worry about it.
You're gonna cover that anyway.
People get so precise and they try to be so perfect with everything.
Some stuff is never gonna matter.
So it's just a matter of figuring out what's gonna matter and what isn't, don't sweat the small details.
Okay, I'm gonna go back in now with a little more white and work it into the brush.
And I'll put a few little accents of something lighter in there.
If you get the opportunity to do this painting, I'd love to see your version of it.
Send me a photo on Facebook or through my email.
My contact info is on my website, WilsonBickford.com.
You can easily find me on Facebook.
There, see, I'll tuck that in with the grass here in the foreground.
If you wanted to smooth out, it looks pretty good.
This one I can tell I smooth it down a little bit.
I kind of liked the rougher texture in that.
It looks more like the water's got some movement to it, so I think I'm gonna leave that.
That looks pretty good to me.
All right, I'm gonna do this path.
That's pretty simple.
Notice that the path is lighter in the distance and it gets darker and grades darker as it comes down.
That tends to make it look more like it lays down flat and it's not just going vertical on this board.
So I'm gonna start with a light mixture up here and go darker as I come down.
I will start with Titanium White, maybe a little bit of this base coat in there just to make it flow a little easier.
And it's just something, a dirt color.
I'm gonna put a little touch of Sienna, maybe a speck of gray.
This one, I don't have much of the black in it, too much gray, it's more of a tan, so it's all good.
It's whatever you come up with.
I'll go with something like this.
I won't have quite as much Sienna maybe in this one, just to be different.
I'm gonna come right up and I can see my line.
I'm gonna come right up to the bridge.
Also notice that the path tapers very, very skinny and it gets wider as it's coming down.
That is linear perspective.
The fact that it's lighter here and darker is aerial perspective.
The fact that it widens out, it's bigger as it's closer to you is linear perspective.
And once you get those two perspective principles in mind and you'll apply 'em, your artwork will take on a tremendous improvement.
Okay, as I come down, I'm gonna keep getting a little darker.
So I'm gonna keep adding a little more Sienna, maybe a little speck of black.
A lot of times I just dab into the darker garbage on my palette.
Wanna get a little, start getting a little darker.
This is gonna be a little grayer.
I started putting a little more black with it.
And the key is where every time I switch colors, there's gonna be a band there, it's gonna be a line, so you have to go back and marry those together, just like we married the two tones of the orange together in the trees.
So I'll bring this down to about here.
And like I said, if you go over your line on your grass area, don't worry about it.
Now see right here, I'm gonna go up into that lighter tone, and then back down into the darker tone.
You'll see that they just transform right together, just the way I want 'em to.
The canvas is dry there.
We didn't use any base coat, so what I see is what I get.
So it's not altering my color at all, which is actually a plus and an asset.
I'm going even darker down here.
This is just more Sienna and black.
Hey, I got a question for ya.
What do you get if you cross a surrealist painter with a boxer?
Mohammed Dali.
(chuckles) Yeah, you knew that already, didn't ya?
Yeah, I bet.
Okay, now see I'm just darkening the color, and I'm bleeding them together.
I'm gonna go one more pass of dark down here on the bottom, try to get even just a little bit darker yet.
And then I'm gonna spatter some texture.
The more I emphasize that value shift from light to dark, the more that road is gonna lay down.
So having said that, I'm gonna go a little bit darker yet down here.
I could also try to go a little lighter up here.
It's all good.
Whatever's gonna work.
And then I'm gonna come back to my fan brush I had before, and I'm gonna rinse it out really quickly.
It's got that rust color in it.
I'm going to spatter.
I'm gonna take some of this dark color I just used, maybe bleed a little more into it, and I'm gonna thin the paint down and pull the bristles back, let them snap forward to deposit some dots on that road, which will look like gravel and little pockmarks and whatnot.
Now be careful you don't get it up into your trees.
Notice I get really tight to the canvas, close, and I just fling a few bristles at a time.
I'm going to wipe the brush off and smooth that out, blend it, not smooth it, but blend it and stretch it out a little bit.
And the clock on the wall says I've gotta go, so I will join up with you next time.
Don't don't miss the second half of this and we'll finish "Bridging the Gap."
Until next time, stay creative and keep painting.
- [Announcer] Support for "Painting with Wilson Bickford" is provided by the J.M.
McDonald foundation, continuing the example modeled by J.M.
MacDonald by contributing to education, health, humanities and human services, sharing since 1952, online at jmMcDonaldFoundation.org.
(upbeat music) In rural New York state bordered by the St. Lawrence River in the Adirondack Mountains is a sprawling landscape with communities that offer self-guided tours for the creatively inclined.
Learn the stories behind the barn-filled traditions, family, agriculture, nature, and beauty.
St. Lawrence County, life undiscovered.
- [Announcer] All 13 episodes of "Painting with Wilson Bickford," Season Seven 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 Sunset Lake with the in-depth "Paint Smart, Not Hard" series of Wilson Bickford instructional DVDs.
Includes the bonus episode, "Don't be so Coy."
Additional titles available.
Order online or watch or download directly to your computer or mobile device.
More information at wpbstv.org/painting.
(mellow music)