Trompe l'oeil (pronounced TROMP LOY) means to fool the eye.... In art, this technique has been used since ancient times to create illusions on walls, ceilings, floors, and furniture....it is often combined with what we think of today as a "faux finish"- such as creating the illusion of marble, stone, wood on humble surfaces with paint....

This was traditionally done when the real material was either too expensive or inappropriate for the area it was to cover.....so people who really couldn't afford a marble floor paid an artisan a few pennies and voila, marble...

Somewhere along the way artists began adding other things to these surfaces, and the illusion was even more astounding...you could transform a plain wall into a garden and open up your ceiling to show a sky complete with clouds and flying birds...

These techniques and the illusions of reality they created became time honored and today there is definately a renewed interest in trompe l'oeil....

About 15 years ago I became interested in painting on furniture.....generally trompe l'oeil is seen as murals on walls...and also on ceilings, floors and paintings....but I wanted to do smaller pieces that I could create and reproduce for sale through wholesale craft shows and catalogs....I started by painting on found vintage tables and then started designing and collaborating in the building and painting of a line of fine furniture and accessories for the home and office.

Here are a few of the pieces from that collection...you can find more in my portfolio.

I have also taught the art of trompe l'oeil for years and one of the first exercises I have my students do is one that uses simple everyday items....like playing cards. There are a few hard and fast rules for choosing what to depict....

• The items have to be the SAME SIZE as the real object....
• they have to all have the SAME LIGHT SOURCE....
• and SHADOW RENDERING is very important.....
• the objects have to be STATIONARY, NOT MOVING to be convincing....the minute you try to capture movement, the illusion is broken.

You can't get a convincing illusion if you are painting something that comes away from the surface very far...choose objects that are low to the surface....cards, envelopes,keys, ribbon, fabrics are just a few of the many things that translate well into trompe l'oeil.....this pertains equally to vertical surfaces as well as horizontal ones....if you try to paint a tall glass of wine on top of a tabletop, it will be hard to convince someone that it is really there..if you have it on its side, with wine having been spilled, it works.....

For this demonstration I have chosen to paint on a horizontal surface, like a tabletop would be, with several very simple everyday items, two playing cards and a blue marble....For the sake of simplicity and expediency I chose to use acrylic paint on a grey mattboard...

The first thing I did was to tape two actual cards together in the back and place them underneath a piece of tracing paper.....using a straight edge of some kind, I traced all the lines and design elements with pencil.

Using transfer paper that you can buy at a craft supply store, I transfered the outline of the cards down onto the surface of the mattboard....I just placed the tracing outline where I wanted to paint the cards, secured it with tape and slipped the transfer sheet between the paper and board...then I just traced the OUTLINE ONLY onto the mattboard.

Next I taped the edges of the cards with PAINTER'S TAPE, which you can get at any hardware or paint store....painter's tape is less adhesive than most masking or drafting tapes and for the most part won't tear your paper when you take it off...the reason I tapes the edges is that it is much easier to paint over a taped edge and create a straight painted edge than to try to carefully paint it....and the name of the game in trompe l'oeil is USE WHATEVER TOOLS YOU CAN to help make the illusion complete...

Now I mixed up some OFF-WHITE acrylic paint....the cards are white but if you use pure white to paint them, you won't be able to do any highlighting...so you save your brightest white for those....I painted a thin coat of paint over the entire card area....dried it with a hair blower, then applied another coat....it usually takes several somewhat thin coats to get a nice opaque solid with no brush marks...

Once that was dried, I peeled off the tape...it's important that when you apply the tape you really burnish it on the edge where paint will be brushes, this makes sure that it won't bleed underneath the tape....and then to take the tape off, it's best to pull it slowy on a diagonal, this keeps the tape from pulling up the paper and allows it come off easily....

Well, sometimes things don't work out exactly how you want them to....I see that I have pulled up a few small areas of paint when I removed the tape....now I could have just gone back in to touch them up...but they seemed like a good opportunity to show you how to deal with cracked or uneven edges....details that make things look more convincing..so I am going to leave these ragged edges and pretend I planned it that way.....

Next I repositioned the tracing of the cards on top of the card shape and secured it in place with tape....slipped the transfer sheet underneath and with a pencil traced the interior lines of the cards, the inside edges and the designs and numbers....

The next step was to mix the colors...in this case pretty easy, cadmium medium and ivory black with a little water...using as small a brush as possible to be able to do all the detail, I filled in the colors and also painted the blue marble color.....

Once those were dry, I mixed a thin shadow color...you can use burnt umber and black or a little ultramarine blue and umber, what ever you like as long as it's not solid black...if you paint a solid shadow, it won't look real, there is always reflected color and light in a shadow...I put a thin wash of this down on the shadow shape of the marble and fine lines next to the left side of the cards...it's important to really make the shadows consistent..so either look at an actual set up of what you are painting with lighting from one source, or use a photograph of a set up, or just use your common sense and visualize the direction the light is coming from and then have your shadows fall like they actually would....the marble shadow becomes a thinly painted graduated shape, getting darker the closer it comes to the marble...then the marble itself has some shadow reflected onto its surface....

Next I painted the highlights and reflections...it's a little hard to see on the cards themselves, but I painted a fine line of pure white along the edges of the cards where they would be exposed to the brightest light, and put a highlight on the marble....

Here is a close up of the shadowed areas especially...notice how the notched places on the edge of the bottom card starts to really look real....the shadows did that, by carefully placing them to the left and bottom of any protrusion, it creates an illusion of three dimension, even though very flat....

And here is the finished piece from a little bit of a distance....at first glance, your eyes really do believe that there are two playing cards sitting there on a grey board, with a small blue marble next to them....

Although this was a simple exercise, hopefully you can see how you could use these basic techniques to create as elaborate an illusion as you might want...and they can be done using a number or mediums and tools, from water based pigmentst, using brushes, airbrush (wonderful for creating the most convincing shadows),to oil based pigments. Oils are great for their ability to keep a long "open time" for you to blend and do glazes with, water pigments are great because they dry so quickly so you don't have to wait forever to get to the next step.

Faux finishes are another whole area of trompe l'oeil that has its own techniques and tools..but to create the illusion of three dimensional objects you just need to know a few tricks and hopefully I have covered most of them here...of course it does help if you have experience in rendering representational objects but even if your experience is limited, you can learn to do simple trompe l'oeil paintings by following these few basic steps.