- Today's project was inspired by a scene I encountered recently just down the road from my house.

Join me next on Painting With Wilson Bickford and I'll show you my techniques for painting December Sunrise.

(calm music) - [Announcer] Support for Painting With Wilson Bickford is provided by the J.M.

McDonald Foundation, continuing the example modeled by J.M.

McDonald by contributing to education, health, humanities and human services.

Sharing since 1952.

Online at jmmcdonaldfoundation.org.

(upbeat music) The View Center for Arts and Culture is an Adirondack exhibition and performance space featuring in-person and online classes for creatives of all ages and abilities.

Open calls, events, and class schedules online at viewarts.org.

- Oh, hi.

Thanks for joining me today.

I'm just sitting here reading the paper.

I was reading some of these stories in the news.

They say that a butcher accidentally backed into a meat grinder, which resulted in him getting a little behind in his work.

Can you imagine?

And a cross eyed teacher lost her job because she couldn't control her pupils.

I'm telling you it's a crazy world we live in, isn't it?

Well, I'm glad you joined me today.

I'm just sitting here on a cold winter morning reading the paper and catching up on world events.

But we're gonna paint December Sunrise today.

So I'm glad you made it.

This was inspired by a scene just down the road, literally, like two miles down the road from my house.

I live within three miles of the local, little rural country post office.

Out of five days a week, Monday through Friday, I'm down there three or four days.

I'm always mailing out DVDs or paintings or something.

And about a month ago I was coming back from the post office towards home and I happened across this scene.

I did it from memory.

I didn't stop and take a photo, but by the time I got home, I could still kind of visualize it and had it memorized somewhat.

And the sun was just coming up above the tree line early morning and the sky was very colorful, a really nice sunrise coming up.

So I came home and painted it.

And for something different, I decided to do it on one of these wraparound canvases, which, to be able to paint all four edges, you have to get it up off your easel.

So I just take an old piece of scrap wood, or you could use heavy cardboard, put a couple screws in it.

So I can go around the edges.

When this is all said and done, you can just use one of the sawtooth hangers like this that pound in.

Sometimes they come with nails.

One of these little hangers, put that on the back.

It doesn't need to be framed.

You can hang it right up as is.

So we're gonna start with some acrylic underpainting here and I'm gonna move on and do oil glazes.

This is glazing today.

So I know a lot of times you see me use the white base coat look good in there and blend into it.

This has nothing to do with that.

Same idea, it's gonna be wet on wet, but we're gonna use clear, transparent glaze, which I thought would be a nice lesson in itself.

So I'm gonna run through the materials here, and then I'm gonna show you how I got to this stage.

For the acrylic stage, for this, I'm gonna be using, and I don't have any specifics here, I just took random acrylic paint that I had on hand in the studio.

You're gonna need a brown acrylic, a black acrylic, blue acrylic, some green and some white.

And I've got 'em right here on a plate.

If you hold it up too much they're gonna run all over the place.

These are actually black and white gesso, if you're familiar with these.

These are tube colors that I had from other sources.

That's gonna be the acrylics.

And for the acrylic stage, I'm gonna be using a small texture brush, number two detailed script liner and my number two liner.

And you'll be able to download this sheet from the WPBS website.

And you'll also be able to get this printout, a copy of this, just as a reference to look at when you do yours.

When we get to the oil phase, we'll be using cadmium yellow pale, red rose deep, ultramarine blue and titanium white.

All I have is the primaries, red, yellow, blue.

And I'm also gonna be using some clear glazing medium.

For brushes and the oils, I will be using a two inch scenery brush, a number 10 large flat brush, number six round brush, number three fan brush, number two liner, number two long script liner, a one inch mop brush and possibly a small painting knife, that's optional, but I'll show you how I did it.

What I used it for.

Okay.

I'm gonna start out with some acrylic.

I'm gonna take this down just to show you how I got to that point.

I'm just gonna mock it up on one of these smaller canvas panels here.

I'm not gonna paint the whole thing.

I do wanna give you the nuts and bolts so you understand what I did, but I'm not gonna paint the whole thing.

I started by taking a pencil and just finding my snow line so I knew where it was.

Now, I could tape the snow area off on the bottom and do it that way or I could just simply paint the blue over the ragged edges here.

You'll see once I get going.

For these background trees underneath here, I actually used the brown acrylic.

And I'm gonna lay my little paper plate pallet right here.

I used the one inch texture brush.

I used the top corner of the brush, like this.

Keep the bristles nice and open, just like I would if I was using oil paint, you've probably seen me do that before with oils.

And I just lightly touch like this to establish that rough top edge that suggests trees back there.

Now these are dead winter trees so it's just a network of branches really.

But we're gonna lay snow on 'em so you don't have to paint every individual branch and all that.

So I just did that all the way across.

They don't look very brown there now, but they were, I'm gonna put some snow on 'em.

So that's how I did the background trees.

Now this is acrylic.

Be aware that you're gonna have to wash your brush out here shortly.

So I did that.

Actually, you can rinse that out.

I have some water here.

Rinse that brown out.

And it's a good idea to let this tack up or dry a little bit before you do this next step, I don't have the luxury of that time right now.

But I take blue the same way.

This is like a bluish gray.

I'm thinking shadowed snow.

Load the brush the same way.

And if I touch lightly, it gives me that texture like snow on the branches.

Don't fill it in completely, lose all of the brown.

You want that darkness showing through.

See that looks like shadowed snow on the trees.

Right here in the vicinity of where my sun is gonna go, I used white 'cause I wanted to brighten that up like the sun was hitting in that particular area.

And I didn't wet this, you can, you can rinse it out, wet it, dry it off.

I think I can wipe it clean enough for what I'm demonstrating here.

I took white, and right along the top edge of the glow where the sun is gonna be coming through, I dabbed a little bit right on there.

It'll be a little brighter there where the sun's peeking through.

Okay, I think I'm done with that brush so I'm gonna soak that in the water.

From there, I took some black acrylic.

This is the black gesso with the number two liner.

Now this is a little cup of water.

You'll wanna thin your acrylics with water, not paint thinner.

When we switch over to the oils, you'll be using paint thinner.

I'm gonna take some of this black and I put these nice dark trees in here.

The limb trees, I guess I would say.

And you can take your time with this.

See the canvas is dry.

So if you get your paint thin, it goes on really easily.

It's why I do it this way with the underpainting, because I can nice definition and detail on this dry canvas.

If I was to have a wet oil background, it's very hard to get this nice degree of detail.

Even over the top of this, we're still gonna be working in a wet on wet approach with the oils.

So I put in all the trees that I wanted.

I'll switch that out in the water.

I took the number two detail script liner, which is a little bit bigger fluffier brush.

And I took some of the green with a little bit of the brown to lessen the intensity of it.

You'll want to thin that down with a little bit of water, roll the brush.

I've got some evergreens in here.

You can just put 'em wherever.

I'm gonna talk about that here in just a moment.

So I start with a center spine and I just work from the middle out and dab and suggest branches.

It's in the distance.

You don't have to get too crazy with it.

And I could let it just fade in behind those darker trees like that, like I did here.

Or if you wanted, you could actually bring it in front of the brown trees.

You'd have to change the value to do that.

I'd probably have to put a little bit of white, just a little bit, just to get that to show up.

Light against dark.

And we're gonna put snow on it, so the snow would bring it out too.

So that's your call on those trees.

I rinsed this out.

I took a little bit of the blue.

So I'm using a lot of blue for the snow because the trees are more or less in silhouette.

The sunlight is behind them.

So there's not a lot of white on the snow.

And see, I can have a little bit of the blue on there.

You can put a little bit of white if you want.

Say my sun was gonna be over here, I could just kiss the edges of that a little bit with some white where it's facing the light a little bit.

And that's how I accomplished that and brought this up to this level.

From there, I took a foam brush, actually with some of the blue.

Now you could use one of your oil brushes, you just need to wash it out afterwards.

And I just cut that off cleanly on the bottom and that's where my snow is going to be, down below.

So that's how I brought it up to that level.

I have to stop and wash all these brushes out because I intend to use them with the oil phase.

Soap and water 'em up really good to get 'em nice and clean.

I'll be right back.

(upbeat music) To put the bird on the stalk, make sure you have a logical place where he could perch.

Notice on this one, there's a bent over stem, blade of grass that he's perched on.

I've created one here as well.

If you break him down into a thumb shape and then a little bit of a tail, put a smaller head on and a beak, it's pretty easy.

I've mixed up a nice dark value here with the blue, the red and a little bit of yellow.

And if I come in and put on a thumb, keep him small.

You will have to thin this down with your paint thinner.

Keep him on the smaller side of things.

We don't want any turkeys sitting on here necessarily, not that I have anything against turkeys.

Put a tail hanging down like that.

A little round head on top and pull out a little beak, and he's just watching the sun come up.

Give it a try.

All right, washed the acrylic out of my brushes and I'm ready to go onto the oil phase.

Now, when you're designing your composition, make sure you get don't get anything too balanced and too perfectly symmetrical.

This is a poor composition.

Notice the sun's right in the middle.

Notice these trees on either side are the same distance apart, they're almost like opposite twins here.

They're doing the same thing.

And then you have these on the outside, very poor composition.

This is the same way you don't want something dead center in the middle of the canvas like this, the sun or that tree.

And notice that everything is just laid out too predictably.

Now I did this from memory.

Like I said, I didn't take a photo, but I made sure when I came home that I broke it down.

So there's no rhyme or reason to it really.

And everything's just spaced unevenly and mother nature would never line anything up perfectly like that, so make sure that you don't.

So I'm gonna switch over here now to the two inch scenery brush.

I'm going to apply a very, very thin coat of clear glazing medium to this whole canvas.

I'm gonna go right around the edges because the edges of this painting are painted all the way around with color.

See, by having it mounted on the board, I can have easy access to these areas.

And sometimes I will take it right off here and hold it at a different angle to get there.

But that's just gonna mess up your view of it so I won't do that.

I can work with it.

But if you wanna take it down and, you know, move it to a more friendly hand angle, that's accepted.

It's easy to do.

Like I said, I do it a lot of the time, especially to get underneath here.

I'll take it and hold it up and then I can see what I'm doing.

That's just gonna mess up your viewing, so.

As long as you understand that, that's all I'm interested in.

From here, it's a pretty easy process.

I'm gonna use my fan brush.

I'm gonna take some yellow.

I have two samples here because I wanted to show you that you can get differences in 'em.

Notice that this one's a much paler yellow, this one's more intense, this one I got just a little bit of the pink in there.

I got more intense pink here.

Bluish purple clouds here, reddish purple clouds here.

It's a all good.

So whatever you come up with.

I'm not gonna put any white with these colors.

The idea is I wanna be able to paint over this background and have the background show.

If I use some white in there, it's gonna get cloudy, which would be more in line with the other project in this series where I showed you the foggy effect.

I'm just gonna scrub this on like this.

If I hit the trees, that's okay.

I'm saving this brush to do my blending.

You're probably wondering why I'm putting it on with this fan brush, but.

This canvas is seven inches by 14 inches.

It's kind of a narrow panoramic format, which I kind of like just for something different.

A lot of times I use 10 by 20 is in my product line, actually, and I use that a lot of times for a size.

From there, I'm gonna take a little bit of the red into that.

See, I don't need much paint.

Notice I'm knocking a lot of paint right out of the brush.

(paintbrush stroking) This one's gonna be more intense than either of these two, but I'm doing that intentionally so you can see the difference.

I want you to realize that you wanna do it your way.

You don't have to do it just the way that I'm doing it.

See how little paint I'm putting on, not much at all.

It's a glaze.

It's a transparent film of color.

That's all glaze is.

Now that still looks pretty rough, but I'm gonna come back and blend everything together.

And I've been telling you this whole series in one's past, blending fixes everything.

(paintbrush stroking) Okay.

I'm just making sure I get in the edges here.

I'm gonna rinse this out because I want more of a bluish tone.

If I were to leave the red in the brush, it's gonna mix with the blue that I add next.

It'll be more of a purple color, which is fine if I wanted that in my upper sky up here, there's nothing wrong with that.

I don't want something more bluish.

You don't mean my blue.

It's my favorite color.

So I'm gonna take a little bit of blue on the brush, not much.

Very faint.

I can put a blue tone in here.

And see I'm using the same exact three colors that I did for these other two.

I'm just mixing them a little differently.

And you can do this a painting thousand times and never do the same one twice.

Just by the intensity of the colors you're using, how you mix them.

I'm going a lot stronger blue on this one, I went stronger red.

I'm living it up.

Life too short for dull colors folks.

No dull colors allowed.

Okay.

You'd want to take pains getting this edge here.

I'm trying to get it but, like I said, I don't wanna move it around too much.

It's gonna ruin your viewing angle.

(paintbrush stroking) All right.

Kind of digging that.

I like it a little more intense.

Okay, I'm gonna take this brush.

Now this had the clear glaze on it.

I'm just gonna wipe it off.

If I come in and just kind of work everything together a little bit.

I'm blending.

So you just wanna kinda smooth it out.

It won't blend quite as smoothly as if we were using the white base coat, but it doesn't have to.

It'll be smooth enough.

Let's see if I come up here into the blue, I'm picking blue up on the brush, probably.

So I don't wanna go back down into that yellow without at least wiping it off.

(paintbrush stroking) But that's how I achieved each of those.

And like I said, it's the same colors.

This one I went with a bluish purple.

This is more of reddish purple.

It's all good.

I'm just gonna mix and match here and see what I come up with.

I'm gonna put a little bit of blue into a little bit of that red that I had previously.

I don't need much paint on the brush, I don't want much paint on the brush.

I'm gonna try that flavor right there and see what I think.

It's a little darker, it's purplely, but I like it.

I'm gonna go with it.

So I just randomly scuff in a few cloud shapes.

Look, I can go right through the tree.

It looks like the cloud is behind the tree.

That's the beauty of the underpainting and using the glaze technique 'cause the glaze is transparent.

All of the work with this painting is in the underpainting.

So you wanna take pains with that and do a good job on your under painting.

(paintbrush stroking) And then to soften it, I just wipe the brush and fuzz it out a little bit, just using little circular and oval strokes.

On this one I got some really little distant clouds back in there.

You can just put some little stringers in there if you wanted to like that.

See how easily that falls together.

Paint smart, not hard guys.

Paint smart, not hard.

I can't say it enough.

I knew if I under painted this to this degree, it would make the process very simple for me and it does.

Okay, I'm gonna take the number six round brush.

I'm gonna take some titanium white.

I'm gonna pick a spot for my sun.

I could go here or I could go here.

I think I'm gonna go here.

I'm just gonna put a little bright spot to represent the sun just kind of coming up above the trees.

Don't make it too big.

You want it just coming above the tree tops a little bit.

And I'm gonna lose the bottom right into the trees so it looks like it's filtered out a little bit.

Put a bright spot in there.

I'm gonna wipe the brush with far less paint on it.

And I've got the rays kinda breaking the edge here a little bit.

They're coming through.

You don't wanna leave them too opaque and too chalky.

So you'll see that once I put 'em on, I'm gonna blend them.

You probably want an odd number, not two or four or six.

So I'll just put maybe five in here.

See, they look a little harsh.

And you can have 'em varying widths, make some a little wider, leave some a little skinnier.

They look kinda harsh right there.

So I'm going to rinse out my fan brush, dry it off.

And I'm gonna feather 'em out.

It's okay if I drag some of this sun ray color down onto this blue, 'cause I can get rid of that in the next step.

So don't sweat the small details that don't matter.

That's not gonna matter.

So don't worry about it.

See if I thin that veil of paint down, see it gets a little more transparent like a ray.

It's really, really easy to do guys, I'm telling you.

A lot of people look at a painting like this and they scratch their head and say, "My word, how did you get that?"

But this is it.

This is it right here.

It's not hard at all.

It's just knowing the tricks of the trade.

And a lot of these are just stuff that I've developed over the years and figured out by process of elimination what works and what doesn't.

Okay, from there I'm gonna take the number 10 flat brush with some white and a little spec of blue.

And I've got some hills and gullies in the snow here.

I'm gonna go a little bluer than that.

- [Woman] Also need you to move over.

- I'm gonna go a little blue than that first, before I put the light in.

You'd wanna wrap some of these around the edges here a little bit.

Let's see, I'm just randomly scuffing.

I'm kinda going with the lay of the land.

I'll come back with the big brush.

Let's smooth this in.

Now see I'm leaving a lot of the blue undertone showing as the shadows within the snow.

See, once you blend that, look how easily that translates to snow.

It's just as easy as what I'm showing you here.

In this area, it's a lot stronger 'cause I want the sun shining.

I actually used my small painting knife.

I'm gonna take this and cut off a ridge right on the the blade.

And right here on the snow where the sun is burning through there just enough, I'm just gonna kind of put this on to get that real nice bright spot in there.

Looks like a good place to walk through there with my snow shoes.

Glenda and I like to go snowshoeing.

We're going here in a couple weeks for the weekend and we're gonna explore some new snowshoeing trails that we've never been to downstate (indistinct).

So I'm kind of looking forward to that.

So it gives out a nice glow.

And lastly, we've got some grass in here.

I'm gonna take yellow with some of the red to achieve an orange.

And then we're gonna put just a little bit of the blue, which is the compliment.

And I should be something kinda brownish, give or take.

It won't be brown brown, but it'll be brownish, kinda like this.

And if I come in and just lightly pull up, I wanna go a little darker.

I'm gonna put a little more blue with that.

There we go.

And, put as much or as little of that as you like.

I'm going to embellish it with a long liner.

The key to using this is getting your paint quite thin.

So I'm gonna thin it right down.

And in some of these closer clumps, I'm going to pull up longer blades and reeds and weeds.

And that's how I did December Sunrise.

I've gotta put a bird on that branch.

That will be in the quick tip.

So you wanna check the quick tip out and I'll show you how to do that, step by step.

I hope you enjoyed this lesson.

I'd love to see your version of it.

So send me a copy of it.

You can track me down through my website or Facebook.

I'm just a phone call or an email away.

Thanks for tuning in.

Till next time, stay creative and keep painting.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Support for painting with Wilson Bickford is provided by the J.M.

McDonald Foundation, continuing the example modeled by J.M.

Donald by contributing to education, health, humanities and human services.

Sharing since 1952.

Online at jmmcdonaldfoundation.org.

(upbeat music) The View Center for Arts and Culture is an Adirondack exhibition and performance space featuring in-person and online classes for creatives of all ages and abilities.

Open calls, events and class schedules online at viewarts.org.

- [Female Announcer] All 13 episodes of painting with Wilson Bickford season eight 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 Sundown Beacon 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.

(upbeat music)