The Green Man

For a personal project in my scenic art class I decided to try some trompe l'oeil!

It's dictonary definition - an art technique involving extremely realistic imagery in order to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects appear in three dimensions, instead of actually being a two-dimensional painting.

I chose the Green Man image for a couple of reasons. Firstly I'm a hippy at heart and love this image, it was an image of something 3D and would have to capture those dimensions and I love the stone texture and was hoping to include that feel in the finished result.








To start with I scaled up the image with the canvas I was using. This is a way of transferring an image from one size onto a larger canvas using a ratio though keeping the dimensions the same.
To work it out you take the size of the larger canvas and divide it by the size of your smaller image to get a ratio.

-you can also cheat this by using an overhead projector.
For the purpose of this excercise - I worked out a scale and transfered the image to a larger scale on my canvas by sketching it out.

I used black and white acrylic paints - mixing them to make a number of varying shades of grey.

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I realised that in order to enhance the optical illusion of a 3D image it was imperative to increase the contrast of the colours - the dark regions really dark and the lighter regions really light.

Advice given by my tutor - try and get rid of the white as soon as you can - so I selected the base colour and began to fill everywhere I saw it. After that I just filled in the highlights.



Am pleased with the result - if you stand back it looks almost 3D.