Three-dimensional Painting: Decorative Painting Part 3

A three-dimensional effect can be created with the help of light and shadow. The three-dimensional painting turns a smooth surface into a spatial object with just a few strokes. How, Friederike Schulz shows in the third episode of her decorative painting series.

Text and photos: Friederike Schulz

Three-dimensional painting is often used in the Bavarian ventilation painting. A fine line brush, a medium-sized cat tongue (a soft, rounded brush), a painter's ruler or a painting stick are required to carry out painted light and shadow. As a manual skill, a safe handling of the painting stick or the ruler is required.

A sketch serves as the basis

At the beginning of the work you should make a sketch of the bar or the object that you want to display. The following factors are important:

• Is there an inside or outside curvature or a sharp corner?
• Which direction does the light come from?
• And very important: which is the light color and which is the shadow?

If you z. For example, if you want to display a cassette, you draw the bar from two perspectives on a sheet of paper in advance and mark the areas with the strongest reflection and the course of the light as well as the areas with the strongest shadows and their course. The best way to transfer the dimensions is with adhesive tape strips on which the markings are drawn at the top and bottom. For long distances, the lines should be connected using a chalk line.

Light and shadow

People like to speak of gray painting, but have to make a clear distinction that no gray backgrounds are provided in gray painting, since this is really only about the use of black and white in its gradations to gray. But if you z. B. want to create a three-dimensional effect on a wooden surface, then you have to fall back on the light and shadow colors of the wood. The mahogany wood imitation from the Malerblatt edition from December 2017 (page 12/13) serves as the basis for the explanation of the individual steps. For the shadow and the light you mix a full tone, which is diluted down as a semitone. The shade of the mahogany cassette is a very dark gray-brown, the light tone is a dirty red-orange (the basic tone of the wood grain is usually a good guideline for the "light color").

Other episodes of the decorative painting series:

Painted fabric

Painted mahogany wood

Wall in a tartan skirt