5 Easy Ways to Add a Sense of Depth in Your Work

Depth plays a crucial role in the paintings of watercolorist Andy Evansen, Ep.12. As a landscape artist, depth and distance is a part of the story he’s trying to tell his viewers. He wants to be able to portray that this cow is closer to you and that mountain is further away.

But it’s not just landscape artists who might need to capture a sense of depth in their work. No matter what you paint, here’s five ways to add depth to your paintings.

Put it to Practice:

Here are five ways to create a sense of depth in your work.

First, vary the size of objects and shapes

Objects closer to your viewer will be larger. That same object further back will be smaller.

For example, if you’re painting two pine trees, make the one closer to your viewer larger than one further away.

You can create a subtle sense of distance in your still life as well. Make the lemon in the foreground just a bit bigger than one in the background. It doesn’t have to be much. The human eye will read it as depth.

Second, adjust color temperature

Objects will appear cooler as they move further back in space and warmer as they come forward in space.

Remember, this is relative. A lemon already starts off pretty warm. So maybe it will be slightly green leaning further back and orange leaning closer up.

Your green trees will be bluer further back and will have more yellow or red as they get closer to you.

Third, change your saturation

Objects closer to you will look brighter than those same objects a long ways off. You can mimic that in your own paintings by adjusting the saturation in the objects you paint.

For example, if you mix your foreground trees with just blue plus yellow, add a touch of green’s complement (red) into the mixture for the treeline further back in your painting.

The brighter green will push forward and the more muted green will recede back.

Fourth, lighten (or darken) your colors

Not only do shapes get smaller, cooler and less saturated the further away they are, they also get lighter.

If you’re looking at a treeline three miles off, it might be much lighter.

A great place to see this is when you’re standing on a ridge overlooking rolling hills. The hills closest to you will be much darker than the hills further away.

When dealing with shorter distances, say the distance across a table, the effects will be much more subtle. The background apple in your still life will be just a bit lighter than the apple in your foreground.

Fifth, adjust your value contrasts

Objects closer to your viewer will have much more value contrast than objects further away.

If you look at a tree with a shadow next to you, that shadow might be really dark and the light side of the tree really light.

But if you were looking at that same combination on a hill miles away, the shadow would seem less dark and the light side would seem less light. The tree farther away would have less value contrast than the tree right next to you.

Conclusion:

So much of painting is mimicking what our eyes see in life. The next time you’re out in the world, notice how objects further away are smaller, cooler, less saturated, lighter and have less value contrast.

When you’re painting, you can then adjust these same principles to fit the amount of depth you want to create in your subject matter. Maybe that’s just a small sense of depth like in still life. Or a massive sense of depth like in a sweeping landscape.