It wasn’t until the Renaissance that artists actually thought about creating depth in their paintings.
Until that time almost all paintings portrayed holy figures and little attention was given to the background. These icons, however beautiful, were flat and one dimensional.
If you find your paintings seem flat and lacking the depth you envision, don’t despair.
It’s not your lack of talent that’s keeping your paintings from looking as though you could step into them and march away to the horizon.
There’s several tricks and techniques those Renaissance masters developed that will have your paintings looking almost as three-dimensional as the view out your window.
1. Use A Horizontal Format
First, try using a horizontal format instead of a vertical support. Our eyes look at things horizontally. We have two of them set side-by-side, so viewing things horizontally is our natural instinct.
2. Overlap Elements
As you’re laying out your composition, make some of the elements of your drawing overlap in some fashion. Whether you overlap a bit or a bunch, your brain deduces that one item is further back in the setting than the other. This encourages your mind to see depth in the composition.
3. Make Elements Increasingly Smaller
As well as overlapping objects in your painting, your elements should become smaller as they move away from the foreground of the painting.
The classic road or fence posts diminishing as they move away from the foreground is an easy fix for landscapes to portray distance. Creating diminishing sizes of objects in your composition, as well as overlapping those objects, goes a long way to add a sense of depth to your painting.
4. Decrease Details
Think about your eyesight. When you’re looking at something close up, you see it in intense detail. You see every nook and cranny and can count every petal, feather or leaf.
When you look at something from even a short distance, those details are less visible. Our eyesight is excellent for only a few feet. As things move away from the foreground, we lose our ability to see the details. Individual leaves become a mass of color in a tree. Petals of a flower blur to a soft blob.
Decrease the detail of your objects as they move back in the painting, and you’re increasing the development of depth in your canvas.
5. Soften Edges
As part of decreasing the detail, you should also soften the edges of the objects in your painting as they move back in the painting. Again, your eyesight only sees crisp edges so far. Save those razor sharp edges for the front-and-center focal point of your composition.
6. Lighten And Cool Images
As you look further towards the horizon in a landscape, you’ll notice that the depth of color lightens and it takes on a cooler tone. This is an atmospheric phenomenon and using this device is an easy way to give depth to any landscape.
You don’t need to make it dramatic. A light wash of a lighter, cooler glaze over the areas closer to the horizon can add distance. You can also play up the yellow or red tones in the foreground to heighten the contrast.
7. Use Proper Perspective
Although the term perspective can leave a beginning artist’s blood running cold, learning and using simple perspective is not that big of a deal. It’s sort of like color theory – the term is far more frightening than the actual use of the beast.
Learn it, use it and you’ll be amazed and thrilled how much this little bit of knowledge can add to your painting skill.
