How to make a painting look more 3D

Is your painting looking flat and unrealistic? I’m going to help you fix that.

Hi, I’m Anna Mason, welcome to this episode of Nature Studio TV – helping you give your paintings the wow factor. In this series of videos I’m looking at how you can fix some common mistakes with your painting to improve your work.

Often I see pictures ,especially watercolours, that look a little like this. They’ve managed to achieve a bit of shape or form but they’re looking a bit washed out. Too pale overall. They lack pop, or contrast. They fall flat.

So what do you do if your paintings keep ending up this way? Firstly, you congratulate yourself because you’ve not taken your watercolour too dark anywhere – so you can easily improve your painting simply by darkening your darkest tones and midtones up.

Let’s start with the darkest tones. The darkest part of the apple is the dark brown stem. If we can paint that as dark as it needs to be, we can adjust our apple colours with that as our reference on the paper to compare to.

When we assess the value, or as I call it, the tone of a part of our painting- that is, how light or dark a colour is – our perception of it is affected by the other tones that are around it. So in this case if our stem is too pale, then darkening up the darker areas of the apple won’t look right – and we won’t do it.

So, buy a viewfinder like this – or make your own by getting some mid grey colour card and make a hole in it. Hold it over your reference – in this case the photo – and look at the darkest area. Compare it to your painting. We want them to match.

Making sure your painting is dry, go ahead and add another layer of thicker paint to the darker areas. You can test your colours out on some scrap paper, or in the corner first if this makes you nervous. Remember, check with your viewfinder if you’re unsure.

With the darkest area dark enough, it should be clearer how much darker you can take the darker areas in the apple. They’re easier to identify when we look at the apple in black and white and turn them yellow.

So our next step is to work on those darker midtones within our painting next. Again, go ahead and add another layer to those using thicker paint. Or, if you feel nervous, use some quite pale paint, you can always darken gradually by adding lots of layers, so long as your paper is good quality and absorbs well, and you let it dry off between layers.

If you make feather markings on the edges of these darker shapes of colour, it’ll make it easier to achieve a graduated transition along those edges as you darken them up.

The painting looks messy and disjointed now, but the next step is to darken the lighter midtones. Watch the apple come together again as I darken those midtones… starting with the areas that link up to the darker areas, and working into those feathered transitions to smooth them.

Then you can check: do the highlights need darkening some more? Remember, you can check with your viewfinder. Often they just need a really subtle adjustment with really watery pale paint. And you can also use this as an opportunity to work into the edges of highlight to soften that transition by blending it.

And there you have a much more vibrant apple – full of 3D form and leaping off the paper. A painting like this has more impact, and more realism.

So if your watercolours, or any other paintings, are looking too flat and pale – go through this process and you can not only
save your painting from the bin, but you’ll gain confidence so you can really enjoy doing it.